Vaibhav Sooryavanshi’s last appearance in the IPL 2025 season left the fans with a moment to remember. He was seen talking to Rahul Dravid, who told the youngster, “Next year will be crucial. It will be a real test for you because the opposition bowlers would come at you.”By that time, Sooryavanshi had already become the youngest player to score a century in the IPL. But a year later, bowlers still haven’t found an easy way to stop him. He has already scored one century, two fifties and over 400 runs in IPL 2026 so far with the tournament still going on.Even after Dravid left Rajasthan Royals, the franchise continued to work closely on Sooryavanshi’s game. The youngster skipped his Class 10 board exams to attend the Royals training camp. Despite having already scored centuries in England, Australia and South Africa, along with a match-winning 175 in the U19 World Cup final, he spent extra hours improving various parts of his batting.Speaking to Wisden, Sooryavanshi’s mentor and former Rajasthan Royals director of cricket Zubin Bharucha explained how the franchise prepared the youngster for a tougher second IPL season.“Everyone was predicting that he wouldn’t have a good second season in the IPL. And that was a very big motivating factor in terms of how we can prepare him, given that now everyone knows his game and how to attack him. What do we do to be one step ahead? He’s intuitive and extremely intelligent. He’s incredibly sharp. He remembered every little detail of every little ball that came his way. It’s always ready and very well planned, with a very well-planned combination of things that don’t go together,” Bharucha said when speaking to Wisden.Bharucha said that Rajasthan Royals started working on Sooryavanshi’s game from the moment they first laid eyes on him. The franchise tracked everything from his bat speed and swing speed to his strikeouts.According to Bharuch, Sooryavanshi’s bat speed was initially between 90 and 95 kmph. The Royals wanted him to generate more velocity and improve his ability to hit the ball.“We worked very diligently on it. We used heavy at-bats, fielding drills where he was encouraged to hit every ball for a six, and multi-layered sequence drills. In three to four months, we saw his bat speed jump from the 92-95 range to almost 110-115 km/h. That’s massive. In terms of bat speed, that was the second level we focused on. was his ability to approach different balls,” Bharucha said.Bharucha also pointed out that Sooryavanshi used to rely more on off-side shots, which the franchise has been trying to balance.“Initially, he was leaning a bit towards the offside, so his game was a lot of offside shots and not much leg. We had to work on that. Even now, against fuller balls at middle stump over midwicket and square leg, he’s probably not as comfortable as he could be. But we’ve made him significantly better than where he was.”He added that Sooryavanshi followed the same training regime used for players like Yashasvi Jaiswal, Dhruv Jurel, Riyan Parag and Sanju Samson.“From a system point of view, we always monitor the number of balls a player faces every day, every week and every month. Players like Yashasvi Jaiswal, Dhruv Jurel, Riyan Parag and Sanju Samson have gone through thousands and thousands of repetitions and faced thousands of balls in practice. We simply put him through the same process,” Bharucha added.
