Justin Langer and beautiful opposite Vaibhav Sooryavanshi

In the immediate aftermath of a brutal cricket match, coaches usually look to tables, data metrics or video footage for answers. They are looking for the exact moment when the tactical plan frayed at the edges. But when Lucknow Super Giants were systematically dismantled by a 15-year-old kid from Bihar earlier in the Indian Premier League season, Justin Langer did something he has only done twice in his entire life.

He walked onto the turf, put aside thirty-five years of elite cricket pride, and asked an opposing athlete, in this case a 15-year-old teenager, for a selfie.

Langer first felt that strange, unapologetic urge to be star-struck at Optus Stadium, standing in front of his childhood Australian rules football hero Stephen Michael. The second time was in the presence of Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, a boy born in 2011 who had just spent the evening hitting Langer’s bowlers into parts of the stadium they didn’t know existed.

THE WORD I UNDERSTAND LEAST IN SPORTS: TALENT

Langer later admitted in his column for The Nightly that he was completely charmed. So far in a single IPL season, Sooryavanshi has hit 65 sixes – a terrifying metric of destructive consistency unmatched in IPL history. The closest to Vaibhav is Chris Gayle’s legendary 2012 campaign where he smashed 59 shots over the boundary line.

And when the tournament reached its business end, the teenage prodigy did it again. In Wednesday’s high-stakes Eliminator against SunRisers Hyderabad, Sooryavanshi turned the high-pressure playoffs into his personal pitch, a blistering 97 runs off just 29 balls. When a modern-day great like Pat Cummins tried to regain control by firing a 140km/hr racket on top of the off-stump, Vaibhav didn’t fight back. He simply swung the full arc of the bat and put the Australian captain over his head.

It’s the kind of raw, unteachable dominance that makes you rethink everything you understand about elite sport. It bypasses traditional development paths. It doesn’t feel like a skill acquired over thousands of hours; it looks like a first birth.

And that’s what got Langer thinking about the most overused and least understood word in the sports lexicon: Talent.

While Vaibhav was rewriting the rules of what was possible for a 15-year-old in India, a completely different sporting monument was being built on the other side of the planet. In Melbourne, a 38-year-old veteran named Scott Pendlebury was preparing for his 433rd AFL game, breaking the all-time record for VFL/AFL appearances.

Pendlebury was never meant to be a football immortal. By 16, he was a basketball guard on a scholarship to the Australian Institute of Sport – a position he eventually vacated to a youngster named Patty Mills. When Pendlebury chose football, no one was looking at a scrawny kid drafted at number five and predicting a generational legacy. He was not a product of pure, explosive destiny like Donald Bradman or Sachin Tendulkar.

Instead, Pendlebury built his genius in the dark. He took his basketball DNA—spatial awareness, soft hands, an uncanny ability to slow down time while chaos erupted around him—and combined it over 21 seasons of the brutal, weekly contact sport. If Vaibhav Sooryavanshi is talent at its rawest, most God-given expression, Scott Pendlebury is talent as a verb. It’s a craft refined, maintained and fiercely protected for decades of invisible wounds.

HOW DO WE LOOK AT SIZE?

Langer’s observation goes to the very heart of how we perceive greatness. As sports fans, we are constantly drawn to the arrival. We love the lightning strike, the teenage prodigy who comes out of nowhere and bowls 150km/h with absolute disdain before the world is even ready to remember his name.

But as former Australian coach John Buchanan reminded Langer, longevity is the ultimate mark of a true champion. This is what separated Tendulkar and Ponting from being flashes in the pan. It makes LeBron James or the Williams sisters legendary. It takes a completely different kind of genius to show up and survive twenty years at the absolute top than hitting sixes at fifteen.

The beautiful truth of sport lies somewhere between the boy from Bihar and the superman from Collingwood.

There is a layer of greatness that cannot be created – the eye of Bradman, the timing of Tendulkar, the effortless power of Sooryavanshi. But this gift means very little if it is not ultimately combined with the painful, patient architecture of craft. The absolute best in the business will accept the gift but refuse to accept it.

Right now, global sport is witnessing both ends of this fascinating spectrum. In Melbourne, the 38-year-old simply survived a generation through sheer work ethic and sheer willpower. And in India, the 15-year-old is playing cricket like he was sent from another planet.

Both are undeniably talented. But as Justin Langer watched the teenager take the cricketing world by storm on Wednesday night, he left us with a major question to ponder:

Which version of talent moves you more – the gift or the craft?

– The end

Issued by:

Kingshuk Kusari

Published on:

29 May 2026 05:30 IST