Will the IPL 2026 winner be decided by a 15-year-old boy?

By K.R. Nayar

The Indian Premier League is the world’s most popular franchise cricket tournament, but will it be a 15-year-old kid who will decide the winner this season? Vaibhav Sooryavanshi hit a breezy 97 to help Rajasthan Royals (RR) knock Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) out of the tournament and reach Qualifier 2 to take on Gujarat Titans (GT). It is evident that unless GT manages to stop Sooryavanshi, they may find it difficult to reach the final. And should RR reach the final, then Royal Challengers Bangalore will be able to retain the title only if this boy is prevented from running amok. Team meetings will no longer be about strategy but on “How to outlive Sooryavanshi.”

This is a fact and not a child’s play. Whenever Sooryavanshi has hit a whirlwind knock, his team has won. He cannot even be called the Man of the Match because he is still a young boy. If he continues to play such knocks, all that the opposing teams can do is to return home saying “better luck next time.” Very soon there will be an urgent need to have a book like Dale Carnegie’s “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living,” but on this boy, titled “How to Stop Sooryavanshi and Start Winning.” Right now, no one is qualified to write such a book, as this boy has hit all theories for sixes.

It has reached a stage where a bowler feels like popping his collar if he escapes being hit for a six. SRH skipper Pat Cummins could get nightmares and be forced to think all the way back on his flight to Australia about what went wrong with his bowling. He was hit for 25 runs in the third over, which included three back-to-back sixes by Sooryavanshi!  This Australian team skipper, who flew back proudly after beating India in the 2023 World Cup, will need some good positive thinking to erase the fact that he ended up conceding 64 runs in four overs.

For Sooryavanshi, who has surpassed Chris Gayle’s record for the maximum number of sixes in an IPL season as effortlessly as some of his hits, is now giving jitters to every top bowler in the world. Some believe that he has been influenced by video games or has played too much book cricket, where sixes and fours keep popping up. Does Sooryavanshi believe that the game should be played in the same manner on the field too?

His 97 resembled an eviction notice to SRH. In fact, it was a knock that handed Sunrisers a sunset. Bowlers will have to invent new deliveries that physics hasn’t approved yet to stop his sixes. Any normal delivery—good length, short of length, yorker, faster or slower ones, and even googlies—are all being hit for sixes. He now has a tally of 65 sixes, racing past Gayle’s 59 in a single IPL season. How many more would he add to his tally is anyone’s guess, but one thing is certain: this record is likely to stand for a long time unless Sooryavanshi breaks it again.

The ball he misses resembles a typo that is quickly corrected. SRH bowlers would have thanked their stars when he got out.  Had he reached his century, he may have shifted gears to hit only sixes. He had already struck 12 sixes in his 97. No wonder Chris Gayle, who calls himself “The Universe Boss,” dubbed Sooryavanshi the new six machine. It is an apt description because this boy resembles a machine that fires sixes.

The more we watch Sooryavanshi, the more one wonders whether his coach skipped the chapter on “respecting bowlers.” When he bats, the pressure is not on him but on the bowlers. He has turned bowlers nervous, erasing the usual trend of batters getting butterflies in their stomachs while at the crease. 

When he bats, even electronic scoreboards are under pressure. The speed of updates may well trigger a technical glitch.  But for now, it isn’t the machines that are crashing. It’s the opposition.