Ringside View | Vaibhav Suryavanshi Is 15 and Unstoppable – That’s Exactly Why Someone Must Speak Up

Criticising a teenager would be lazy and unfair. By any standards, such intense scrutiny that has fallen on Suryavanshi since his IPL heroics is exceptional, let alone for a boy of his age. A billion pairs of eyes are watching him with a kind of scrutiny that would wreak havoc on far more seasoned minds. That he is even playing, let alone playing so well, says much of a fine temperament.

And therein lies the very reason why this should be challenged, gently, quietly and with determination, before it becomes a habit. India’s greatest cricketers from Sachin Tendulkar to Rahul Dravid to MS Dhoni all possessed the same trait along with their genius: They recognized the game was a greater entity than any one moment of frustration or triumph. They fought hard and they fought clean That standard is the Suryavanshi who must now move closer to silently.

A lot of fingers point in many directions. Suryavanshi has been groomed by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) as part of its development programme. The IPL franchise who provided him with his stage has a responsibility, not just one of profiting. The senior players around him, men who have been through the furnace of international cricket, are peculiarly well-positioned to offer a quiet word in the pavilion.

Cricket’s governing bodies have become ever more sensitive about on-field behaviour, with all three formats governed by a single ICC code of conduct that sees many acts of misconduct result in demerit points and fines even for international stalwarts. Longer-term, when your career is still being constructed even the smallest violation can have a massively outsized reputational consequences.

None of this should take away from what Suryavanshi has achieved. A century at the age of 14 in the IPL, it is the stuff of legends. His range of strokeplay, his understanding of pace bowling and a brash physical confidence at the crease, these are things that come but once in ten years.

But gifts need guardians. That conversation, which should remind Suryavanshi, kindly but firmly, that the boundary rope is just the outer edge of a cricketing pitch and not an outer edge of civilised competition, was owed to him by older players in the game.