Just 197 deliveries into his IPL career, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi has taken the T20 world and Indian cricket by storm. Four hundred and fifty two runs at a strike rate of 229.44 aren’t numbers to be scoffed at. Bring his age, 15, into the picture, and those stats are scarcely believable.
Apart from the overall numbers, the frenzy over Sooryavanshi also comes from the list of top bowlers he has taken down. From Jasprit Bumrah, Josh Hazlewood and Matt Henry, to Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Arshdeep Singh and Marco Jansen, all the bowlers have felt the heat of Sooryavanshi’s onslaught.
In fact, of the 19 bowlers who have bowled at least five deliveries to him in the IPL, only four have managed to restrict him to a strike rate of under 150 – R Ashwin, Prasidh Krishna, Kagiso Rabada and Rashid Khan. On the other hand, ten bowlers have gone at over 250, including Bumrah, Arshdeep and Henry. The list doesn’t include Hazlewood, who disappeared for 18 off four deliveries on Friday.
The stunning quality of Sooryavanshi’s T20 batting is clear from his numbers against reasonably experienced international bowlers. Against bowlers who have played, or went on to play, at least 20 T20Is, he has scored 315 runs from 133 balls in the IPL; the strike rate of 236.84 is marginally higher than his overall IPL strike rate. Sooryavanshi has also averaged 52.50 against these bowlers, also higher than his overall IPL average of 41.09.
Let’s examine the stats for other uncapped batters in their first 11 innings, against capped bowlers who went on to play at least 20 internationals. Taking a cut-off of at least 10 balls faced against such bowlers, Sooryavanshi’s strike rate of nearly 237 is the highest. If we increase the cut-off to 75 balls, then there are 36 such uncapped batters. But the gulf between Sooryavanshi’s strike rate and the next best is massive: Priyansh Arya’s 181.72 is second, followed by Ayush Mhatre’s 177.53.
The scatterplot for some of these batters, plotting average and strike rate, indicates how far ahead of everyone else Sooryavanshi is in terms of strike rate. There are a few others who have averaged 50 or more against these bowlers, but none who is anywhere near his strike rate. Batters like Ishan Kishan, Devdutt Padikkal and Karun Nair, on the other hand, struggled against this set of bowlers in their early, uncapped periods.
Sooryavanshi’s jaw-dropping six-hitting abilities are clear from these stats as well. Against these capped bowlers, he has hit 32 sixes from 133 balls – that’s a rate of a six every 4.16 deliveries. In this list of 36 batters, the next in line is Arya’s 6.64, which means Sooryavanshi is about 37% better in this aspect than the second best.
Even in this age of frenetic six-hitting, Sooryavanshi has taken that skill to another level: in the last two IPL seasons, among the 14 openers who’ve scored at least 400 runs, he leads both in terms of strike rate and in frequency of six-hitting. In fact, Sooryavanshi is the only one striking at over 200, and averaging fewer than five balls per six. No other opener in this list, not even Abhishek Sharma, averages under seven balls per six.
All of those incredible numbers stem from an intent to score boundaries as often as possible. Sooryavanshi’s boundary intent in these 11 IPL innings is 58.4%. Only Abhishek, at 58.5%, is marginally ahead, among these 14 openers in IPL 2025 and 2026. However, Sooryavanshi gets more bang for the buck: off the deliveries that he attempts boundaries, he strikes at 347.8, the highest among these openers.
In just 22 T20 innings and 418 balls, Sooryavanshi has scored 901 runs and struck 80 sixes. Currently, the record for the quickest to 1000 T20 runs is 533 deliveries, by Mitchell Owen, while Kieron Pollard is the fastest to 100 T20 sixes (843 balls). Sooryavanshi is well on his way to breaking both these records.
With inputs from Shiva Jayaraman and Sampath Bandarupalli
S Rajesh is stats editor of ESPNcricinfo. @rajeshstats
