Sooryavanshi has 680 runs in 15 games in IPL 2026 with 4 fifties and one century.
His words came after Sooryavanshi made 97 runs in 29 balls with 12 sixes and 5 fours, helping RR post 243/8 in 20 overs in the IPL 2026 Eliminator game on May 27. In response, Jofra Archer’s three wickets blew away Sunrisers Hyderabad's top order, bowling the team out for 196 runs.
RR won the game by 47 runs and has qualified for Qualifier 2 of the IPL 2026 and will face GT on May 29. The winner of that game will face RCB in the final on May 31 in Ahmedabad.
Ashwin was left stunned by Vaibhav Sooryavanshi’s assault on SRH bowlers and even joked that Sooryavanshi’s parents should protect the youngster from the “evil eye”.
“I don't wanna play 15-year-old boy card, but tell me how many matches did he play at the age of 15 to get this level of mental maturity? If you remember his uppercut over third man for six, the same ball at the start of the season, he was trying to play straight, and it was getting top-edged. Inside a season, he made such changes at the age of just 15,” Ashwin stated on his YouTube channel.
Ashwin then went on to shower even bigger praise on the RR prodigy.
“He is not a normal player. His mom and dad need to do whatever it takes to remove the bad, evil eye from him. This boy in the post-match interview was saying that a hundred will come later. I tried to win the match for my team tonight. The way he bats, he doesn’t care about hundreds because he knows he will get them here and there,” Ashwin added.
Ashwin also emphasized Sooryavanshi's responses to inquiries about managing pressure throughout the postseason.
“There was a question on him, how he was going to play under pressure, and he was incredible,” Ashwin said.
Sooryavanshi has now scored 680 runs this season at an average of 45.33 and a staggering strike rate of 242.86 with one century and four fifties.