Vaibhav Sooryavanshi has collected plenty of labels during his still-young professional journey — “AI”, “prototype”, “baby boss”, even a tongue-in-cheek nod to a modern-day Don Bradman. But none of those comparisons can quite match the impact of a single late Wednesday night message from Bandra, posted around 9 PM. That tweet came after Sooryavanshi tore through Sunrisers Hyderabad in the Eliminator, racing to 97. He was one ball short of the IPL record for the quickest century, yet it was his batting craft that drew the loudest praise.
While Sooryavanshi was in full flow, Sachin Tendulkar stepped in with what could be the highest-profile compliment of his career. Tendulkar wrote: “Vaibhav Sooryavanshi’s bat swing has been outstanding. What’s even more remarkable is how beautifully he clears his front foot to create room for balls aimed at his legs. This freedom allows him to play the way he does.”
And when Tendulkar gives a green light to a batter’s mechanics, it carries weight. After all, few people understand a bat swing like the “Master Blaster” does. Tendulkar’s own rise in the late 1980s came with an unmistakable advantage: as a 15-year-old, the speed and precision of his hand work looked unreal. “Game recognises game”, and in Tendulkar’s view, Sooryavanshi belongs in a class of his own. The ball may arrive at pace, but Sooryavanshi’s timing turns it into scoring chances immediately — his aggressive, sometimes ferocious swing is a major part of why.
Inside the work behind the batting
- Sooryavanshi’s ability wasn’t treated as something he “just had”. His development was built over time, with intensive net sessions designed to sharpen timing, balance and pace.
- His coach Manish Ojha explained that back in 2022, when Sooryavanshi was 11, he would practice from roughly 8 AM until 4–5 PM, facing deliveries clocked between 125 and 130 km/h. Even with raw edges at that stage, the improvement was visible in his eventual performances.
- At the Gennex Cricket Academy, he was exposed to a full range of shot-making demands. Under pressure from both manual and machine bowling, he worked on drives, cuts, upper cuts, pulls, stepping out to hit, and big slog-style strikes. Open-net sessions, match simulations, and target/power hitting were folded into his routine.
Tendulkar’s tweet highlighted two key ideas: the swing itself, and the way Sooryavanshi clears his front foot to open up space for deliveries aimed toward his pads. The second part — his footwork — also ties into how he generates power. Once again, the observation matches the analysis: Sooryavanshi effectively changes what “length” can mean in modern T20 cricket. As documented, his strike rate against length balls this season has been recorded at 240-plus, while many others face the same type of ball at closer to the 140-plus bracket.
Sooryavanshi also appears to thrive on fuller deliveries. His strike rate against those has been measured at 278, helped by a tally of eight fours and nine sixes. Against balls pitched on good length, the numbers dip but remain damaging: a strike rate of 197, with 22 maximums. Even back-of-a-length bowling doesn’t slow him down — he has hit 16 sixes and 12 fours there as well.
Among the bouncers he has faced, he has been especially punishing: three of them have disappeared for six at an extraordinary strike rate of 325. The only delivery type that seems to trouble him slightly is the yorker, largely because full tosses and yorkers have arrived in fewer numbers. Still, if those balls are being struck at 125 km/h, the “weakness” argument doesn’t quite hold — it’s not as though he’s losing battles at the point of contact.
Mechanics: the coiled upper body and the loaded back leg
Veteran coach Zubin Bharucha pointed to the body shape that makes this kind of hitting possible. He said Sooryavanshi’s upper half is superbly “coiled”, paired with a notable bend in his torso at the top of the swing. That combination helps his head move outside the line of most deliveries, which means he is often seeing balls earlier and more cleanly that pass outside off stump directly in front of his eye line. For most batters, that same ball would sit outside their line of sight, making it harder to judge.
Bharucha added that Sooryavanshi’s weight is almost entirely loaded into the back leg. In effect, he operates on one leg, which forces the weight to remain back. If the batter holds that position and avoids sliding the hips forward in the traditional way, the front foot generally can’t drive through with much weight behind it. When there is limited weight on the front side, the follow-through can show up as the front foot finishing flayed open, with the ankle turned over. Bharucha stressed that such an ankle position wouldn’t be possible if there were weight on it — otherwise the body mechanics would be at risk.
Tendulkar, too, would likely relate to this style of stance. Early in his career, he had a bent posture that later became more upright as his career progressed, influenced by injuries and other factors. But with that change came a vulnerability to leg-before-wicket dismissals. Between 1989 and 1995, Tendulkar was out LBW 11 times. From 1996 to 2000, that figure climbed to 15, before jumping sharply to 48 dismissals from 2002 to 2008.
Sooryavanshi, in contrast, has been dismissed LBW just twice in his 80 matches across IPL, First Class, List A and youth cricket. The implication drawn from those numbers is that his technique — rooted in the kind of principles discussed by Bharucha — has been extremely effective.
Bharucha also linked the crease position to how the bat works in relation to the stumps. He said the setup allows the bat to perform its movements in front of the stumps while the body stays inside the ball’s line. Most batters keep their bodies more aligned with the ball, meaning the bat works slightly outside that line. In Sooryavanshi’s case, the deep bend of the back supports hands working ahead of the stumps, similar to some past greats who stood away from leg stump to ensure the bat consistently came in front of the stumps with the body well inside the line.
He further explained that this is the kind of pattern that helped Bradman avoid LBW frequently — fewer than 10 times across his entire career — and even kept batters like Graeme Pollock from getting out LBW. In Bharucha’s view, Sooryavanshi achieves comparable positions on the crease due to the bend in his back, even though he does not use an outside-leg-stump guard.
Finally, Bharucha summed it up with a single key trigger: the hip not sliding forward. That keeps Sooryavanshi in a strong coiled posture on one leg, enabling hip-and-shoulder separation and an aggressive approach to each ball. But once the hip drifts forward — something batting has taught for generations — the batter becomes committed to one length and loses the ability to do what Sooryavanshi does ball after ball: get into a stance that makes nearly every delivery hittable.
Disclaimer: All the data and numbers have been derived exclusively from Hindustan Times Digital’s cricket database.
