Sooryavanshi made 776 runs in IPL 2026 at a strike rate of 237.30 with one ton and 5 fifties.
Former South African batter Daryl Cullinan has expressed concern about 15-year-old Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, saying that the youngster should not be dealing with the pressure and attention that come with playing cricket at this level.
He says Sooryavanshi should be instead enjoying his youth, giving exams, and playing gully cricket with his friends. Sooryavanshi is too young to vote or drive a car, yet there is growing support for his participation in the Indian team.
The fact that he is already a member of India's T20I squad but has yet to play a game has put the Indian team management, especially captain Shreyas Iyer and head coach Gautam Gambhir, in a bind. The decision-makers claim Sooryavanshi must wait for his chance, but fans' patience is growing thin.
“What we are seeing in Vaibhav Sooryavanshi is not simply a talented boy playing above his age. It is something cricket has genuinely never had to deal with before—namely, a child placed at the center of one of the most commercially powerful, globally visible, and socially amplified sporting environments ever created: Indian cricket and the IPL. Cricket has seen prodigies. It has seen young players arrive early and carry labels they did not ask for. But it has not seen this precise combination before: innocence, an extraordinary gift, and a social media world that has abolished nearly every distance between a child and the opinions of hundreds of millions. Sooryavanshi is 15, living a life that is not proceeding at the ordinary pace of growing up. This situation needs careful consideration before it is too late,” Cullinan expressed while writing for Cricinfo.
“In my view, he should be at home preparing for his exams, playing gully cricket with his mates, and being a young boy while he still has the chance. That does not mean ignoring his talent. It means understanding that the talent will only be truly served if the person carrying it is allowed to grow whole,” he added.
Many youngsters from India have shown potential at an early age, only to fizzle out under pressure. The prime example being Prithvi Shaw, who hit a century on his Test debut at 18, but since then, he has unravelled. Only Sachin Tendulkar managed to make a successful career, despite making his first-class debut at 14 and his India debut at 16.
“Sooryavanshi's door has closed very early. His identity has been decided for him by his own gift, the most involuntary thing a person can possess, before he has had much chance to explore alternatives. That is the quiet sadness beneath all the celebration.
Greatness at 15 does not wait politely while the person catches up. It sets a frame. It fixes an image in the public mind. Everything that follows, the mistakes, the growing up, the confusion, the disappointment, and the ordinary human work of becoming yourself, has to happen inside that frame. The boy becomes the legend before he has had the chance simply to become a man,” Cullinan added.
Cullinan advised Sooryavanshi to speak to Sachin Tendulkar, who experienced all this three decades ago.
“What we should hope for is that he retires at 40 and is not washed up at 25. That's another 25 years of him! We should hope that his talent becomes something he inhabits on his own terms, rather than something that inhabits him. We should hope there are still parts of his life in which he can be ordinary and unobserved, in which he can fail quietly, laugh freely, finish his studies, play without a camera nearby, and digest all of what's happening in the quietness of his home and among his family and friends. The best chance of that happening is in the next three years. They should be about him, not cricket. Is that too much to ask?
It is my sincere hope that he will turn to Tendulkar for guidance. He could not be luckier than to have a mentor in a fellow Indian cricketer who has been through it all and seen it all and who will have his best interests at heart,” Cullinan added.
Sooryavanshi will hope for his India debut in the upcoming five T20I series against England, which begins on July 1st.
(Cricinfo inputs)