The first time the Rajasthan Royals scouting team spent serious bandwidth on Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, he was 12 years old and already pulling fast bowlers off the front foot in age-group cricket in Bihar. The first time Royals selector Zubin Bharucha saw him bat in a private trial, he stopped writing notes after the third ball.
"The first ball to a right-hander had jagged back in," Bharucha said of one of those early Sooryavanshi sessions. "Instead, Sooryavanshi hit it over extra cover for six."
What Bharucha kept returning to in interviews was less the boy's talent and more his technique — specifically, a backlift that almost no coach in Indian cricket would teach.
"He has got this beautiful backlift that goes over his head and comes through," Bharucha said. "The bat actually crosses the vertical."
The combination — a high backlift, a long lever and a teenage strength base built on absurdly heavy training volumes — has produced one of the most explosive batters in the IPL. Sooryavanshi became the youngest centurion in men's T20 cricket history at 14 years and 32 days during a domestic tournament. In IPL 2025 he was the youngest player ever to score an IPL century, off 35 balls — the second-fastest in the competition's history.
The physical preparation behind that record is not the kind of thing that turns up in highlight reels. Manish Kumar Ojha, who ran Sooryavanshi's training at the Gen Next Academy in Patna, described a daily routine that bordered on obsessive even by Indian academy standards.
"If I got tired, then I used to tell my support staff to throw balls," Ojha said. "Minimum, he faced 600 balls every day he trained."
The maturity Bharucha keeps describing surfaced repeatedly during age-group cricket. Bihar coach Ashok Kumar tells two stories that have followed Sooryavanshi around. The first is from a tight U-16 match where the team needed a partnership to win. As wickets fell at the other end, Sooryavanshi turned to the dugout.
"Sir, let me play, I will win the match myself," the 13-year-old reportedly said.
The second is from the dressing room before a knockout fixture.
"Sir, ask someone to stay with me till the end," he said. "We'll win this."
He did. That kind of self-direction at 13 is part of why Bharucha's most-quoted line about Sooryavanshi has become a cricketing meme of its own.
"He speaks like a 24-year-old when it comes to batting," the Royals selector said.
Before the IPL final list was sealed, Sooryavanshi played the U-19 World Cup final against England and made 175 off 80 balls — a knock that effectively pushed his Royals price tag past the 1 crore mark at the auction. The franchise had earmarked specific budget for him months in advance.
His father Sanjeev Sooryavanshi, his first coach Brajesh Jha, Ojha at Gen Next and Ashok Kumar at Bihar age-group level all sit on the same page about one thing — that the technique itself is unteachable, and that any attempt to coach the backlift out of him would be the wrong call. Bharucha has said the same publicly. The Royals are selling him as a generational find, not a project, and on the evidence of his first IPL season they are not the only ones who believe it.