The boy from Bihar: The making of Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, Indian cricket’s 15-year-old batting prodigy

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The scene was an inter-academy match being played out by two teams of prospects aged 10 to 12. The game was crawling along at a snail’s pace with a rare boundary here and there. Suddenly, the batter new to the crease played a pull shot.

The ball travelled nearly 80 yards; not high in the sky, but flying flat, screaming across the boundary.

The 11-year-old who had played the shot looked far too small to generate that sort of power. But he kept hitting sixes; one after another, off the pace bowlers and the spinners alike. He flew to 118 in no time with Manish Ojha, the coach overseeing the academy, watching on in disbelief from afar.

When the innings ended, Ojha turned to the boy’s father, sitting beside him, and said: “He’s ready for big cricket.”

The batter was Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. In the years since he has become the youngest player to score a century in the Indian Premier League (IPL), the youngest player to earn a call-up to India’s senior men’s team, and one of the most talked-about teenage cricketers in the world. In the unlikely setting of Stormont, Belfast, he is expected to make his T20 international debut against Ireland on Friday at 15 in the first match of a two-game series, with five further fixtures to come in England next month.

But on that day back in Patna, a city on the south bank of the Ganges in eastern India, there were no television cameras, no headlines and no debates about his future. There was only a child from Bihar state hitting a cricket ball further than a child should.

Most runs. Most sixes. Best strike rate. Emerging Player of the Tournament. Most Valuable Player. Those were the honours Sooryavanshi collected at the end of his first full IPL season. The performances earned him a place in India’s squad for the tour of Ireland and England, making him the youngest player selected for India’s senior national side.

Yet the story of how he got there begins long before the IPL. To understand Sooryavanshi, it helps to understand Bihar.

For years, the state existed on the margins of Indian cricket. Talent was never in short supply, but pathways were. Young cricketers often had to leave home in search of opportunities, while coaches and academies continued working with little recognition. “There was cricket in Bihar, but there was nothing to achieve in cricket,” says Brajesh Jha, Sooryavanshi’s first coach.

His father, Sanjiv Sooryavanshi, knew that reality. A club-level cricketer from the village of Motipur, Sanjiv had once dreamed of taking his game further. Circumstances prevented it as local facilities were so limited. So when his son showed an interest in cricket at an early age, he decided to invest everything he had in that dream.

According to the coaches who worked with him, speaking to The Athletic, Vaibhav was given a bat at the age of four. At five, he arrived at Jha’s academy in Samastipur, a district around 60 miles from Bihar’s capital, Patna.

“When he first came, there were very few children playing cricket in Samastipur district,” Jha says. “There was this tiny child among all the seniors.”

Initially, the training was no different from that of any other young cricketer. Tennis-ball throw downs, shadow practice and basic drills filled his days. But it did not take long for the coaches to realise they were dealing with somebody unusual. “He was very young,” says Jha. “You cannot take away the childhood of a small child.

“But as soon as he was told something, he followed the task very quickly. How to take a stance, how to run, whatever was explained to him.”

Soon, the routine changed. Instead of simply joining the regular academy sessions, Sooryavanshi began arriving early for personalised training. Coaches spent extra time with him. The drills became more demanding and the results followed.

“When we took him to Patna for trials, in the whole area, the news spread that there was a small left-handed batter from Samastipur who had exceptional talent,” Jha says. “He was selected in the state Under-17 team at the age of eight-and-a-half.”

For most children, that would have been enough, but for the Sooryavanshis it was only the beginning.

The family believed Vaibhav needed stronger competition and better coaching. That meant travelling to Patna where he would begin working under Ojha. The commitment required was extraordinary. “He and his father would travel to Patna on alternate days,” says Ojha. “The routine was very tough. His mother would get up at 2:30 in the morning to prepare food, and they would leave at 5:30am and reach here around 7:30am.”

The day after, they would do it all again.

Cricket is far from a cheap sport. “Vaibhav’s father was in a lot of debt because cricket is a very expensive game,” Ojha says. “They didn’t have many means, but Sanjiv didn’t give up. He risked it all for his child and had faith in him.”

The sacrifices were matched by the extraordinary workload taken on by the youngster. Ojha estimates Sooryavanshi regularly faced at least 600 balls during training sessions. “The level of toughness that he had in his practice sessions, the more I increased it, the more easily he adapted to it,“ Ojha says. “His adaptability was amazing.

“When Vaibhav used to train, if you sent him for fielding, within 10 minutes he would come and say his head was hurting. But if you asked him to even bat at night, he would never say he was tired.”

There is a temptation now to view Sooryavanshi’s six-hitting as natural, instinctive; as if he arrived fully formed. His coaches tell a different story.

“Today, Vaibhav is scoring the fastest hundreds in T20 cricket, but I have seen the day when he played 100 balls and scored only 30 runs,” says Jha, recalling Sooryavanshi at the age of nine. “I was so happy because playing 100 balls meant he had the capacity to play 100 balls. He was facing state bowlers sometimes more than twice his age. He wasn’t making runs because he didn’t have the power yet, but he was playing 100 balls.”

For the coaches, that mattered more than boundaries. The power would come later, but the temperament was there.

By then, word was spreading through Bihar’s cricket circles. One of the boys who watched his rise from close quarters was Sraman Nigrodh, a team-mate six years Sooryavanshi’s senior who trained alongside him.

“We were all struggling,” Nigrodh says of facing senior bowlers in the academy matches. “No batsman was able to hit the bowlers. But then there was Vaibhav. He was different. No kid can play like him. No senior player can play like him.

“Vaibhav was very small. He was eight or nine years old, but was facing (teenagers and young men) confidently. He didn’t have any problem.”

One of those bowlers was Sakib Hussain, now an IPL player with Sunrisers Hyderabad and among the quickest young bowlers in Bihar at the time. Hussain would have been in his mid-teens when he bowled at Sooryavanshi. If the coaches saw talent, team-mates saw fearlessness.

“Everybody knew Sakib had pace,” Nigrodh says. “But Vaibhav didn’t have any problem playing him. He doesn’t have any fear in his life.”

That quality would become apparent when Sooryavanshi made his first-class debut in the Ranji Trophy for Bihar at the age of 12 in January 2024. Ranji Trophy cricket represents the highest level of domestic red-ball cricket in India. Most players spend years trying to reach it. Sooryavanshi arrived while still in school.

“To play Ranji Trophy cricket at the age of 12 is almost unheard of,” says Zubin Bharucha, a renowned Indian coach who later helped identify Sooryavanshi for an IPL franchise. “The Bihar selectors who had the courage and conviction to pick him at that age deserve enormous credit.”

His first innings extended to 19 runs and left an impression on those watching. Nigrodh, who opened alongside him, remembers the approach more than the score.

“He and I made our Ranji Trophy debut together — we were opening partners,” he says. “The thing about Vaibhav is that he is fearless. He doesn’t fear the ball or the bowler and just backs himself to score.”

The rise continued. He represented India’s under-19 side while still years younger than most of his team-mates. He scored a hundred against their Australian counterparts, off 58 balls, on youth Test debut in September 2024 to make IPL franchise scouts take notice.

For Bharucha, who saw him at a trial, the attraction was immediate. “I genuinely believed this kid was the best batting talent I had seen since Sachin Tendulkar, and there was genuine conviction behind it,” he says.

Rajasthan Royals moved quickly.

At the IPL auction in 2024, they secured him for INR 1.10 crore (around $116,000; £87,670). The following year, he made his IPL debut at 14. He hit the first ball he faced for six. He soon became the youngest centurion in the tournament’s history.

Doubts about his age have emerged from time to time and, while official documents have verified his date of birth and satisfied Indian cricket’s governing body, the sceptics will not always be satisfied. Regardless, a player capable of smashing an 11-ball half century, as he did for India A against Sri Lanka A over the weekend — the fastest scored in a List A 50-over match — would be a phenomenal feat whether he was 15 or 17.

Yet Bharucha believes what separates Sooryavanshi is not simply his age or talent.

“One of his rare qualities is his ability to grow alongside the game,” he says. “What people see today is not what existed when he was eight. There was a point when he did not even have the fastest bat speed among his team-mates. That was identified and worked on diligently for a period of three months.”

The improvement was dramatic. “The truly great players have the ability to wait for the ball longer than everyone else,” says Bharucha. “That ability to delay commitment, to almost suspend time for a fraction longer, is one of the defining traits of elite batting.”

The cricket world now talks about his sixes, his records and the possibility of a long international career. In Ireland this week, with his parents watching on, he might explode upon the senior international scene. England will be braced next month.

But back in Bihar — where his younger brother Ashirvad, 10, recently scored 103 off 87 balls for Cricket Academy Tajpur — his impact is being felt.

“Vaibhav did not really have a role model from Bihar while growing up,” says Ojha. “Internationally, Brian Lara (the West Indies great) was the player he looked up to. Even from a young age, his thought process was similar to Lara’s; he always wanted to dominate the game and take the attack to the opposition.

“But these days, Vaibhav is a big motivation not only for kids, but also for parents. Before, parents here didn’t allow kids to go into sports. Today, four and five-year-olds come to the ground with their parents to train.”

For years, Bihar waited for a cricketer who could convince people that such dreams were possible. The queues of children now flocking to academies across the state, carrying bats that often seem too big for them, have an inspiration in whose footsteps they can follow.