The fast bowler’s good length, between six to eight metres from the batter’s stumps, is the “good” length across formats and across the phases of a white-ball innings, consistently yielding the lowest batting strike rates out of all length bands. That length gives a fast bowler the perfect balance between making the ball reach the top of the stumps and ideal amounts of movement in the air and off the pitch to flirt with the bat’s edge or beat it. In the 2025 and 2026 IPL seasons (up to May 6 this year) good-length balls have been hit for a six a mere 6.6% of the time. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi has hit 16.4% of balls from that length for six.
Sooryavanshi’s dominance over other players extends beyond just this good length. The pitch map below breaks down his performance by length against pace. Against balls on a good length, he strikes at 218 (the average batter strikes at 134). In the hard length (8-10m), he goes at 226 while the average batter goes at 148. In the slot length (4-6m), he strikes at a whopping 408, compared to the average batter, who goes at 206. In fact, apart from the yorker length, no length is safe for the bowler when Sooryavanshi takes guard.
The way he brutally eviscerates all lengths means Sooryavanshi has a Bradmanesque per-ball “Runs-Added Impact” (RAI) figure for the last two IPL seasons. RAI uses the ideal progression of a T20 innings obtained from the Duckworth-Lewis Pro method to calculate the “runs added” to a team’s total by a batter’s actions. In addition to rewarding quick scoring, it also penalises batters for getting out – the earlier they get out, the higher the deduction. The plot below shows the RAI per 100 balls (X-axis) vs the wickets-above-average (WAA) per 100 balls. The WAA tells you how much more or less a batter gets out compared to the average batter given the situations they play in.
Look at where Sooryavanshi is; he loses 1.1 more wickets than the average batter per 100 balls, but his RAI is the highest. He compensates more than handsomely by scoring at a fiendishly high rate. Every ball he bats adds 0.52 runs to the team’s total. The next highest is Tim David at 0.38, but Sooryavanshi bats for much longer than David, adding 8.9 runs per innings to his team’s efforts. The next highest over the same period has been Heinrich Klaasen at 5.8 runs per innings. Yet again, Sooryavanshi stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries.
Let’s go a layer deeper, using ball-tracking data to filter his performance against “difficult” kinds of deliveries. The table below shows his performance for five different kinds of deliveries by seamers. Batters who have faced more than 30 balls of each kind in the last two IPL seasons have been considered. In each category, Sooryavanshi’s strike rate lies at or close to the top and exceeds the average batter’s SR by a high margin. High release points, extreme pace, extreme bounce, high grip off the pitch, good lengths – no matter how you slice it, Sooryavanshi outstrips his competition significantly.
As the youngest batter playing at such an advanced level of cricket, he is perhaps the first child of the T20 age, born and raised during the heyday of the format. His training and his intentions are unencumbered by the baggage of convention. A line from his old coach Manish Kumar Ojha, from this excellent profile of Sooryavanshi, goes: “[… ] as long as he trained, I’ve never seen him train defence. I wanted to add something new or perfect an existing stroke. Try and see how many options he could have for every delivery.” In a recent game against Lucknow Super Giants, Sooryavanshi played out five dot balls from Mohsin Khan. He got out trying to bash the sixth. He told people afterwards that he couldn’t bear the idea of playing a maiden over. Accumulation and survival are the cornerstones of batting; Sooryavanshi has thrown them to the wind. Others merely adopted T20, Sooryavanshi was born in it and moulded by it.
The bar charts below show Sooryavanshi’s most frequent shot types against pace in the powerplay, comparing them to other batters on strike rate, control percentage, percentage of elevated shots hit, and frequency of playing them. There is a wealth of conclusions to unravel here, but let me draw your attention to three points for now. Firstly, Sooryavanshi plays the slog 10.2% of the time, compared to 3.9% by other batters. He lofts the slog about 50% of the time, at par with other batters, but the sheer frequency of his slogs provides a boost to his strike rate. And this pattern holds for the good and hard lengths as well. His “slogs” come down with a straight bat, a marked contrast from the usual cross-bat hoick, leading to higher control than other batters (more on that later).
Second, look at the percentage of elevated shots he hits on the on-drive, compared to other batters. This is a shot he employs prominently to good balls to gather boundaries; we shall come back to it when we discuss his technique. Third, look at his strike rates on every shot compared to the other batters – he beats the field handsomely in addition to having better control percentages for most shots. He chooses to hit more, hits more in the air, and hits better than the average batter by far.
Intent alone, however, counts for nothing on the field. Sooryavanshi’s dominance results from the marriage of his intrepid, new-age, T20-conditioned thought process with his iconoclastic technique. To understand his unusual mechanics better, I spoke to Zubin Bharucha, the former Mumbai Ranji player who works closely with a number of elite Indian players. Bharucha spoke of the young batter’s heavy lean towards the off side, saying that it “enables him to push his hands into a wider position”, while also ensuring that he can stay outside the line of the ball. Every ball is now inside his eyeline, and he can see it clearly with both eyes.
To illustrate the anomaly of Sooryavanshi’s lean using hard numbers, I got in touch with CricProcess, a Mumbai-based company that works on pose estimation and biomechanical metrics for cricket. The plot below compares the torso lean angle, the angle the top half of the body makes with the vertical, for Sooryavanshi and Abhishek Sharma in various stages of the batters’ action, from stance to follow-through. The data was generated using front-on videos of the two batters playing similar deliveries. It is clear how much more Sooryavanshi leans to the off side compared to Abhishek before their downswings, achieving a peak torso lean angle of more than 45 degrees!
This heavy lean is complemented by a unique trigger and weight-transfer mechanism. The plot below shows the bend of Sooryavanshi’s front and back knee angles as he goes through a delivery. Before the ball is bowled, the front knee is heavily bent (high angle). As the ball is released, the front knee straightens (angle goes down) and in conjunction, the angle of the back knee rises. This means that Sooryavanshi is triggering to transfer weight fully onto his back leg as the ball gets delivered. During the downswing, the back leg tenses the most (maximum angle) as the front knee continues straightening. Just before impact, the front leg is extended outward but bears little weight; all of it is on the back leg.
According to Bharucha, this is the opposite of conventional instructions to batters – they are told to press forward to length balls. Sooryavanshi leans back and stays there, his front leg a mere spectator in the drama that unfolds from trigger to follow-through. Bharucha adds that Sooryavanshi lands somewhere between the heel and the toe of his back foot at around the point of peak backlift, which is a tough position to get into but ensures that he doesn’t lose balance and fall over. “His weight is almost always on his back foot,” Bharucha says, “which means he doesn’t overly commit the front foot. That [committing the front foot] is batting kryptonite and [not doing that] suggests he will handle a moving ball better than most. Almost every time he hits the ball, he is loaded onto his back foot, whether in defence or attack. It doesn’t mean he isn’t playing off the front foot; rather, he is constantly leaning back into the back foot to access a position from which he can strike a six off virtually any delivery. In effect, he is always set up to do so.” Sooryavanshi’s high boundary rate off good-length balls and the slight lateness of his interception points, as recorded in ball-tracking data, seem to corroborate this reasoning.
The third component of Sooryavanshi’s batting mechanics is the coiling of the body. The bearing of weight on the (very strong) back leg enables him to load and wring his body inward before the shot. He pivots his torso inward using his hip. This is akin to the mechanics of the best baseball hitters, who twist their trunks to maximise the separation angle between their hips and shoulders before hitting. The idea is for the torso itself to store rotational energy, like the rotating analogue of a loaded spring. When this tension unravels just before impact, the energy of the uncoiling upper body augments the energy from the bat swing, multiplying the power of the shot. Pause a Sooryavanshi video at the peak of his backlift, and you see how his upper body is full of torsion, waiting to unlock. On this, Bharucha says: “The bend of the back enables him to get into this incredible coil [tensing his upper body], with a front foot that rises every time he coils up. Whether playing pace or spin, it’s always identical. This is the essence of power generation. You actually generate the ability to coil, tilt and break the wrists very early in the movement by staying on that one foot [back foot].”
The final piece of the puzzle is the backlift-downswing combination. Sooryavanshi’s bat first goes up and then comes down to the level of the stumps. After that, it rises more sideways than up, and astoundingly, goes laterally instead of behind him, extending his arms fully. At this point, his wrists cock and the bat toe goes forward owing to the rotation of his wrists, pointing to cover. Finally his wrists uncock, his bat goes high up and wide in a Lara-esque upswing, and the ball is met in a flash, the body uncoiling in sync. In contrast to other batters, the uncocking of the wrists happens before the downswing for Sooryavanshi, unleashing all his power before the bat comes down. It’s like a dam bursting, according to Bharucha: “From this position he doesn’t have to do much except just finish the shot, because he has already stored all the power through the coil and the early break of the wrists before the bat even comes down. This has been proven by Str8bat, who measure various aspects of bat speeds and specifically see maximum increase in his bat speed at that early stage of the cycle.”
That description is on point. It is almost impossible to isolate any frames between the final vertical upswing and the ball impact in a frame-by-frame play. It is that fast. According to Bharucha, this unique upswing-coil-downswing does not make an appearance in early videos showing Sooryavanshi – it was an intuitively developed tool to combat faster bowlers as the boy grew up, enabling him to load up and wait for the ball.
The unique angle of Sooryavanshi’s backlift and downswing, his front leg being taken completely out of the way while he hits the ball, and his fast hands all combine to enable him to hit the same ball much straighter than other batters, if he chooses to do so. This lowers his risk and allows him to put “length” balls away, since he “hangs back” compared to other batters, redefining the good length for himself. This is the key to his on-drive shot we discussed earlier – he lofts it twice as often as other batters, and has a strike rate twice as high as others on it.
If there is one unique signature of Sooryavanshi on the wagon wheel, it is his hitting in the leg-side straight V. The wagon wheels below show the relative frequencies of his shots compared to other batters. The first one shows balls arriving between middle stump and fourth stump (0 to 0.4 metres): he hits in the straight leg-side V 1.4 times more often than others. (The 1.5 behind square on off is mostly from false shots and can be ignored.)
The second wagon wheel shows balls arriving straighter than middle stump. Again, his shot zone distribution is much straighter than for others, targeting midwicket more than square leg. Because his front leg is not in the way, Sooryavanshi never has to play “around” it. Although his bat goes extremely wide because of the torso lean, bend of the back, and square backlift, his final downswing can also make the bat come down in a straighter arc, giving him much more power and control in addition to the ability to target a safer part of the field.
So how does one stop the first child prodigy of the T20 age? The beehive plot below above shows his strike rates in different zones of line and height at which the ball is projected to reach the stumps.
It hints that yorkers and low full tosses might be the only kinds of balls that curtail Sooryavanshi. Even then, the sample sizes are very small, and the batter is a known problem-solver. Perhaps well-delivered hard-length slower balls can mess with the surety of his downswing? Perhaps more bowling at his throat, or maybe bowling wider to get outside his eyeline? For now, no one knows for sure. This 15-year-old has every think tank scrambling in panic. His batting burns with the radiance of a thousand suns, torching every coaching manual in its wake, blazing a hitter’s trail in a batter’s world.
Himanish Ganjoo served as consultant analyst for the India men’s team from 2022 to 2024.
