IPL 2025: Age No Bar, Vaibhav Suryavanshi Proves That

Vaibhav Suryavanshi has taken the cricket world by storm by playing arguably the most astonishing knock ever played by a 14-year-old in the history of the game.

The sheer intensity, scale and audacity of the innings by Vaibhav, who smashed a monumental hundred off just 35 balls and, in the process, became the youngest T20 centurion in history, has also now stirred a hornet's nest about what exactly is the right age to initiate a player into professional sport.

Such has been the impact of the incredible batting that Vaibhav showcased on Monday night at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur that it has now conjured up images of a then very young prodigy named Sachin Tendulkar, who fuelled the imagination of the country with his coming-of-age performance against Pakistan in Peshawar in an unofficial exhibition match on the 1989 tour.

The teenaged Mumbaikar had slammed Pakistan's Abdul Qadir, one of the greatest leg-spinners of the time, for four consecutive sixes that sent Indian media and fans into a tizzy then.

Tendulkar was 16 at that time, and his age made heads turn as much as his eye-catching and striking cricketing skills that defied it.

But again, he was still a 16-year-old. That makes the effort more plausible, or so it seems to observers now in hindsight.

Now, how about 14 years and 32 days when you play the biggest and the greatest breakout knock of your career, defying conventional notions of player maturity in the big, tough world of the Indian Premier League (IPL), which is exactly what Vaibhav has done.

Vaibhav just cracked that code and busted all thoughts, theories or limitations that contradicted the possibilities of such a thing called age.

The IPL has been a huge platform for teenagers making their way into the league, evidenced by the success of the likes of Ayush Mhatre, Prithvi Shaw, Sanju Samson, Rishabh Pant, Yashasvi Jaiswal, etc., over the years.

Mumbai boy Mhatre, who recently debuted for Chennai Super Kings against Mumbai Indians at the Wankhede Stadium at the age of 17 years, is another case in point to illustrate age has no or very little bearing on the players’ ability to succeed at the highest level in professional sport.

From plying his wares in domestic cricket in the Ranji Trophy, where he struck a hundred for Mumbai against Maharashtra in the season that just concluded, to making it to the IPL, Mhatre has shown enough glimpses of the same prodigious talent that Vaibhav has now screamed into the cricketing world’s consciousness.

Jaiswal and Shaw preceded Vaibhav and Mhatre, but they all are products of the same stable, where the innate ability to play on a transcendental level at a very young age separated them from the rest.

Prodigious teen talent is not a new thing in the sporting world if one steps outside of cricket.

Be it the legendary Pele and the iconic Diego Maradona in football or Boris Becker and Martina Hingis in tennis, young talent with age-defying and myth-busting abilities have stunned and mesmerised the sporting arena with nothing but pure, natural gifts at their disposal.

When Vaibhav’s name was announced for the IPL Auction for 2025, there were naysayers and detractors who doubted the credentials of the boy, and that included some seasoned cricket analysts.

It’s a reflection of how sporting success, or any success at an age such as 14, is looked upon with a fair amount of trepidation by the moral aesthetics of our society, where successful people are made to wonder about their accolades.

There isn’t a particular age where one can decide if a player is ready for the highest level, and Vaibhav’s case has made that belief all the more stronger.

The writing on the wall is crystal clear, and that is simply to trust the incredible ability a player can bring to the table and let him or her unleash themselves on the biggest of stages.

Critics who may think if 14 is the age where a boy has the emotional maturity to handle the pulls and pressures of the glitz and glam of the IPL will have to understand that you don’t learn a thing in success.

Whether one is 14 or 24 or 34, failures teach you everything, and there is no escaping that and Vaibhav, despite his blockbuster statement to the world, will go through that strenuous process in the coming days, months and years and come out an even better player.

The Vaibhav story also gives a sneak peek into how success is perceived in Indian society at large.

Post the match when Gujarat Titans skipper Shubman Gill was asked about Vaibhav’s spellbinding innings against them, the affable Gill was not very sweeping in his praise of the teen.

All he could afford to say was Vaibhav got lucky on his day, and that is a telling tale of the prism through which early success is seen in our part of the world.

Almost all of the cricketers mentioned above have exploded on the scene, playing some great knocks, which paved the way for establishing their careers not just in the league but also propelling them onto the international scene and representing India in the white-ball formats and Test cricket as well.

Coming from Samastipur in Bihar, Vaibhav's story furthers the cause of India unearthing some of its big, world-class talents from the non-traditional centres, which perhaps started in a major way with the coming on the scene of Mahendra Singh Dhoni for Team India in 2004.

Ranchi, which was also a part of Bihar before the bifurcation of the state, is where Dhoni hails from, and to think that Vaibhav was born seven years after MSD made his debut and now the teenage prodigy is playing against him in the same edition of the league is surreal.

What Vaibhav has also done now is to give India a maddening choice of explosive and aggressive openers to choose from: Abhishek Sharma, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Sai Sudharsan and Shubman Gill.

And to think Vaibhav is a good decade younger than, say, someone like Sharma makes that an even more incredible mix of precocious talent available at the country's disposal in the white-ball formats and especially in the T20 version.

Haridev Pushparaj is the Sports Editor of FPJ.