The room they built for Vaibhav Sooryavanshi Cricket News:
In Belfast this week, men with measuring tapes solved a small architectural problem. India need a second dressing room. Not the usual communal affair where mature professionals remove their pads and talk about their hamstrings, but a different one, because one of the cricketers brought by India to Ireland is fifteen years old, and the law takes a bad look at a minor sharing a changing place with grown men.So they made him a room. Stop at that, because this is the whole story wrapped up in one carpentry work. The richest sports board commissions a private room for a boy it has not yet decided to choose. The robes were sewn while the elect were still, behind closed doors, debating whether the coronation should take place. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, of Tajpur in Bihar’s Mithila region, may or may not make his India debut against Ireland tomorrow. He could go out and become, at fifteen, the youngest man to play for India, demoting Tendulkar to second place in a record held since 1989, back when this boy’s parents were children. Or he could sit in his beautiful new room and watch, as the selectors could do the cold arithmetic and decide that the side that had just won the T20 World Cup would not, on a damp Belfast night, need immediate distraction. Both are true at once, and holding both is the only honest way to see him.Consider what he is. The IPL numbers read like a misprint. 776 runs, a strike rate of 237, Gayle’s record of sixes in a season was broken by a youngster who had no life at the start of the league. Male cricketers, who are professionally allergic to hyperbole, have reached out for words they usually hide. The bat speed was almost unheard of before. A throwback to the grainy footage of Sobers. Grown men who give their lives to bowling are not, in a beautiful phrase, confused and helpless. This is not the language of promise. This is the language of arrival.
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi with the Player of the Match trophy after his explosive 94 in the Tri-Nation Series final in Sri Lanka. (Image credit: BCCI)
And yet, cricket is not a meritocracy in the way the posters insist; it is a meritocracy complicated by arithmetic. India opener Sanju Samson and: Abhishek Sharmawhich are not problems to be solved but men who have earned their places, one of them is the Player in a tournament that India just won. Shreyas Iyer, the new captain, wanted in the middle. Mathematics has no spare seat. To sit the wonder you have to remove a person who has done nothing bad except a feeling, and there is something almost cruel in the way that the goodness can be quietly insufficient when there is an event.This is the part that entrepreneurs leave behind in the dream. We want our talent stories to run downhill, gathering speed. the small town, the bat, the records, the inevitable blue jersey, cue strings. But the interesting thing about Sooryavanshi’s week is not the inevitability. This is friction. He’s too good to leave and too troublesome to put down, and how the tension is resolved tells us less about him than it does about the people holding the pen on the team sheet. The boy did his part. He, in the only sentence that can be administered by the chairman of the electorate, elected himself. What remains is whether the adults have the nerve to act on it, or whether they will wait, cautiously, for a slower occasion against a kinder opponent.I found that I didn’t really care where it was going. If he plays and flays the Irish attack, we will witness something. If he waits, the room they built will hold his breath for a few more days, and the record will remain, like records. I mean flattening it into a fairy tale, reducing a strange and unresolved moment to the usual syrup about dreams come true.A boy from Bihar is afraid of a board to make him a room. Will he be allowed to sit on it tomorrow, in the end, is a lesser question than the one already answered when he arrives. that the next one of them, the faster-stronger-child that we keep promising, will not come. Here it is, fifteen years old, stuffed, waiting for a decision that should be under it.
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