The Ages of Man

Child's play, the hair of KL Rahul and more notes from the IPL

At what age does striking a 35-ball hundred in professional cricket cease to become amazing? If Vaibhav Suryavanshi was 15, that’d still be a head-scratcher wouldn’t it? What about 16, the age that Sachin debuted in Test matches or Luke Littler reached the final of the World Darts Championship? That has to be, like wow, yeah? Seventeen? How many people have done it at 17, the age of Boris Becker when he won at Wimbledon?

Well, none is the answer, because only Chris Gayle has done it faster, and he was 33 at the time and it still felt pretty bloody amazing then. And you might include AB de Villers, who was 30 when he struck a 31-ball hundred an an ODI. So Vaibhav is the only man – boy? teenager? – to have done it was a disparity of +20 between chronological age and deliveries faced, so maybe that should be our measure.

‘Not 14’ was the first message I got yesterday as he swiped his 35th delivery beyond the ropes and into history. There followed an evening of social media speculation, founded on not much beyond ‘he looks 16 to me’ or ‘I heard from someone who’d know…’ Perhaps the best evidence was the diffidence once he was out and then after the game, fiddling with his hair and not quite knowing where to put himself - that really is an early teenage tell.

He is in the white heat of scrutiny now, though, and may not survive it. Is he another Sachin, another Becker, another Littler, apparently impervious to pressure and fame, happy in a mad bubble of his own creation? Or is he another Barney Gibson, England’s youngest first-class cricketer at 15, who happily stepped away four years later, or Prayas Ray Barman, the IPL’s previous youngest at 16, who played one game in 2019? Or a Prithvi Shaw, a Vinod Kambli?

Age offers an instant narrative, and not always a happy one. Too much, too soon is the song they will sing if young Vaibhav hasn’t notched up a few more 35-ball tons in what’s considered the ‘right’ amount of time, if he’s been distracted by money or a girlfriend, if his head has been turned by another kind of life.

There is someone obvious missing from the list of youthful ton merchants above, and that is Shahid Afridi. In 1996, he debuted for Pakistan in a tri-series in Nairobi, did not bat, and then in his second game struck a 37-ball century against Sri Lanka, then a world record. He was 16 years old and an overnight sensation.

But look him up now, and you’ll find that wikipedia gives his date of birth as 1 March, 1977. On Cricbuzz, it’s 1 March, 1980. It’s 1980 on Cricinfo too. In Afridi’s autobiography, Game Changer, published in 2019, he writes of that day in 1996: ‘also, for the record, I was just nineteen and not sixteen like they claim. I was born in 1975, so yes, the authorities stated my age incorrectly.’

So if Shahid Afridi is right he would have been at least 20 at the time, not nineteen. Does being 20 take the edge off a 37-ball world record? And if it does, it must also add to Afridi’s legend, because he was still playing T20 cricket for Pakistan in 2016, when he would have been, by his estimation, 41 years old.

Vaibhav is eligible to play U19 cricket for another five years, but unless he does so, his real age is no issue. Maybe he’s fourteen and maybe he isn’t, but the IPL, the vastness of India, the breadth and depth of its reach, its essential mystery, says that if not now, some day someone will be.

King Legend rolling back the years on his Insta…

The age gap is widening, too. The stars on which the competition was built have a more brittle brilliance as they hear the future whirring in their ears, a tinitus buzz that won’t go away. Virat Kohli is, at the time of writing, a handful of runs behind Sai Sudharsan in the race for the Orange Cap he clearly covets, but his strike rate… oh boy. That’s in the dumper. At 138.87 it is defiantly old man-ish, lower than anyone else in the top twenty run scorers. Of the top ten, only fellow oldster KL Rahul and Aiden Markram are below 150, and they only just. You have to go all the way down to Shivam Dube at number 21 to find anyone batting slower than Kohli. Of the top 40 runscorers this year, that pair and a fading Rachin Ravindra are the bottom three.

So what, Kohli may say, look at the table… and he would be right. RCB have had a series of mid-level run chases, and Kohli has been Kohli in shepherding them through. But it’s not just the stats, it’s the manner of runmaking that has shifted gears, changed things up, left him behind.

Meanwhile KL has been applauded for adapting his game into a synthesis of the classical and what you’d call the modern pragmatic. He’s also grown his hair, the classic male response to encroaching middle age.

Have a gander at that barnet. It’s like something out a shampoo ad (and maybe there’s one coming), so soft and shiny does it fall about his shoulders. Look at me, it says, I’ve still got it. And I still need it because they’ve got 14 year olds playing this game now…

KL, old friend, we’ve all been there…

Australian cricket is elite, as viewers of their many Amazon Prime series will know. Elite mateship. Elite team meetings, elite breakfast, lunch and dinner. Thus elite nicknaming comes easy. For time immemorial Ricky Ponting, once of Pondulkar, now coach of Punjab Kings, has been ‘Punter’, and his one-time teammate and current IPL commentator Matthew Hayden has been ‘Haydos’.

No more though. Not when the man in the street has caught on. When Haydos interviewed Punter mid-match the other day, he began with ‘g’day Punt…’

Classic diminuitive and an elite move. How would Punt respond? Easy. By not once but several times referring to Haydos as ‘Dos’.

Yup. Punt and Dos. These guys will never be beaten. They just won’t allow it.