Fourteen-year-olds are supposed to be cramming for exams, not rewriting record books on the cricket field. Yet here we are, watching Vaibhav Suryavanshi treat bowling attacks like throwdowns in the nets.
In Doha, at the Rising Stars Asia Cup, he went from a potential big talent to a full-blown phenomenon: 144 runs off 42 balls for India A against UAE, a hundred in just 32 deliveries, with 11 fours and 15 sixes. It was his second century in T20 cricket at the senior level, and came before his 15th birthday, making him the youngest player to score a hundred while representing his country in any level of cricket.
A 14-year-old boy amazing the world
Strip away the hype, and you are still left with numbers that are absurd for someone born in 2011. As per current records, Suryavanshi’s returns in senior cricket look like –
That’s just under 500 runs in senior cricket, with T20 hundreds forming the peaks of the graph.
One of these centuries came in the IPL, when he belted 101 off 38 balls for Rajasthan Royals, reaching three figures in 35 balls and becoming the youngest centurion in IPL history and the youngest centurion in any T20. He smashed 94 of those runs in boundaries, including 11 sixes.
Outside franchise cricket, his youth record is also just wild. On the England tour earlier this year, he smashed 143 off 78 for India U19s in Worcester – the fastest known century in Youth ODIs, reached in 52 balls, with 13 fours and 10 sixes.
Add in a 58-ball hundred on U19 Test debut against Australia U19, plus U19 Asia Cup knocks of 76(46) and 67(36). The pattern for this young talent is clear: at every rung – youth, domestic, IPL, India A – Vaibhav Suryavanshi walks in and immediately pushes the scoring-rate slider to maximum.
What’s quite interesting is the split: his first-class numbers are modest, his List A returns promising, and his T20 output is already elite in terms of impact. He is not a finished product; he is a work-in-progress whose strengths happen to intersect perfectly with where the modern game places its biggest spotlight.
When Indian cricket first fell for a teen genius
For a lot of Indian fans, all of this triggers a familiar feeling – a flashback to another teenager who made domestic pros look like age-group opposition.
Back in 1988, a 15-year-old body from Mumbai walked out at the Wankhede in his Ranji debut and scored 100 against Gujarat, becoming the youngest Indian to make a debut hundred.
That boy – Sachin Tendulkar – didn’t stop there. In his first full Ranji season, he piled up 583 runs at an average of 67.77, finishing as his team’s highest run-getter.
At the start of the 1989-90 season, he turned up in the Irani Trophy for Rest of India and produced an unbeaten century against Delhi, another statement knock against ‘grown-up’ attacks.
By the time he walked out for his Test debut in Karachi in November 1989, Tendulkar had already played nine first-class matches, averaging nearly 70 – a number that still gets wheeled out whenever we talk about finished products at a young age.
Those numbers live in a different era – long-format heavy, no IPL, no T20 explosion. But emotionally, the reaction was similar to what Suryavanshi is provoking now: disbelief that someone this young could look so ready, so fearless, so at ease against seasoned professionals.
The feeling more than figures
If you line the two up on a spreadsheet, you will find different patterns: Sachin’s early career was built on the weight of first-class runs, Vaibhav’s on a blizzard of high-impact, high-striker-rate innings across formats. One piled up hundreds over long days; the other is breaking records in a matter of 30-35 deliveries.
But the heart of the story isn’t just a comparison, it’s continuity.
Once in a generation, Indian cricket meets a teenager who makes seasoned watchers sit up a little straighter. Tendulkar did it with red-ball purity and classical strokeplay in the late ‘80s. Suryavanshi is doing it with boundary avalanches and the audacity to make big scores look like a natural extension of his game.
The numbers – IPL hundred at 14, fastest Youth ODI century, 144 off 42 for India – are just the early chapters.
What makes this moment compelling is the sense that we are watching another boy-wonder at the starting line, with Indian cricket once again asking the same excited question it asked in 1988: Just how far can this kid go?
