IPL 2026 – Of the wonderkid Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, and an imaginary WhatsApp group of bowlers

 

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. Image :X

Back in the day when the Williams sisters (Serena and Venus) started to dominate the  world of tennis, there were speculations of Lindsay Davenport and Martina Hingis starting a ‘United Front’, even exchanging emails on how to defeat the sister-duo. Looking back, that part about the pair exchanging emails could be a work of fiction from a few scribes. But it can act as a connecting point for a couple of premier fast bowlers of modern times – Jasprit Bumrah and Josh Hazlewood – to form a group and exchange WhatsApp messages.  In such an imaginary scenario, their only goal would be to get the better of a 15-year-old. The duo is widely acclaimed as two of the finest all-format pacers going around. Yet, they couldn’t stop a teenager from causing mayhem in the IPL landscape.

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, the name of the 15-year-old kid, has five 30 plus scores in the 2026 IPL so far. It isn’t just about those scores, but on four out of those five occasions, his strike rate has been over a mind-numbing 250. Such has been his burgeoning aura that even the in-form Yashasvi Jaiswal is getting a touch overshadowed by Vaibhav’s pyrotechnics. Mind you, Jaiswal himself has notched up 183 runs to Vaibhav’s 200 in the ongoing IPL.

In a corner, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, too, might have thought of sending his application to the imaginary fast-bowling union,  comprising Bumrah and Hazlewood. The other day, in the RCB-RR game, the experienced pace bowler delivered a near-perfect inswinging yorker from round the wicket. Despite Vaibhav’s long and unique arc of bat-swing, the downswing came down on the ball very quickly and it scurried away to the fence.

For a split second, that stroke could have left Bhuvneshwar gasping for breath. We are thinking of a cricketer’s bat-swing that goes up, then comes down fractionally, before making a circle of sorts. Despite all of that, he seems to create his own time and space. This correspondent keeps asking to himself, how does he do it? For the moment, the bowlers’ tribe doesn’t have much of an answer to that question.

In a 2016 movie, Batman went up against another Superhero, Superman, before they eventually formed a partnership against a larger threat. Strictly in an imaginary sense, it is perhaps time for the bowlers to form a secret WhatsApp group where they pitch in their ideas on how to dismiss the wonderkid in the abridged versions of the game. What about the title of the group? If you’re a Bollywood buff, it could be Maha-Sangram (The Big Battle) – inspired from a movie in 1990. Standing in front of them in this ‘battle’ is a 15-year-old wielding his willow like a mace.

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