Rajasthan Royals (RR)’s teenage sensation, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, has become the youngest player in the world to score 500 runs in any T20 tournament. He needed 14 runs to achieve the record and did it in 14 balls against the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur on Tuesday. He has, thus, also become the first player ever to score 500 runs in an IPL season before turning 20.
Sooryavanshi, aged 15, is only the second teenager to go past the 500-run mark in a T20 tournament. The previous best was Devdutt Padikkal, who scored 580 runs in the 2019-20 Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy for Karnataka at the age of 19. In the IPL, now LSG captain Rishabh Pant has scored 684 runs for the Delhi Capitals in IPL 2018, but he was already aged 20 at the time.
This was a different innings from Sooryavanshi. Usually, he goes gung-ho from the first over, but LSG came with better plans against him. Left-arm pacer Mohsin Khan kept him to 1 (4) in the second over of the innings, and then Mayank Yadav bowled tightly to keep him down to 5 (8) and 11 (12).
But he picked up the pace in the next few overs to reach his half-century in 23 balls, his slowest this year.
At the moment, Sooryavanshi also has the highest strike rate for any batter who has crossed 500 runs in any IPL tournament, with just over 232. The second-best is Andre Russell at 204.81 for the Kolkata Knight Riders in IPL 2019. While Sooryavanshi’s strike-rate can mathematically go under Russell’s in the next few matches, it seems unlikely considering how the young left-hander is batting — so he’s set for another record.
426 of Sooryavanshi’s runs in this season have come in the powerplay, which is the second-most for any player in an IPL edition, only behind David Warner’s 467 in 2016 for the Sunrisers Hyderabad.
