In Belfast this week, people with tape measures are solving a small building problem. India needs a second dressing room. This was not the usual public event of adult professionals taking off their pads and discussing hamstrings, but a separate event because one of the cricketers India brought to Ireland was already fifteen years old and the law was pessimistic about minors sharing changing spaces with adult men.So they built him a room. Pause for a moment because the entire story is compressed into carpentry. The sport’s richest board has commissioned a private room for boys who have yet to decide on their selection. The robes are being sewn, while the selectors are still debating behind closed doors whether the coronation should take place. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, who hails from Tajpur in Mithila district of Bihar, may or may not make his debut for India against Ireland tomorrow. He could retire at the age of 15, becoming the youngest player in the Indian team’s history, relegating Tendulkar to second place, a record that has stood since 1989, when the boy’s parents were still children themselves. Or he might sit in his lovely new room and watch as the selectors do the cold arithmetic and decide that a team that has just won the T20 World Cup need no pressing need of interruption on a damp evening in Belfast. Both are true, and holding both is the only honest way to look at him.Think about what kind of person he is. The IPL numbers read like typographical errors: 776 runs, 237 strikes, and Gayle’s single-season record of six hits was broken by a kid who was no longer alive when the league started. Cricketers, allergic to hyperbole in their profession, have now started using their usually hidden one-liners. The speed of the bat is almost unprecedented. A return to Sobers’ grainy footage. To put it in a lovely line, the grown men who gave their lives to bowling were confused and helpless. This is not the language of commitment. This is the language of arrival.
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi was awarded the Man of the Match trophy after scoring an explosive 94 in the Tri-Nations series final in Sri Lanka. (Image source: BCCI)
However, cricket is not a meritocracy as the posters insist. It’s a meritocracy complicated by arithmetic. Team India starts with Sanju Samson and Abhishek SharmaThey were not problems to be solved but men who had earned their place, one of whom was the best player in the tournament that India had just won. New captain Shreyas Iyer wants to play in the middle. There are no extra chairs in mathematics. To install a prodigy, you have to unseat someone who has done nothing wrong but cause a stir, and it’s almost cruel when a phenomenon emerges in which excellence can quietly fall short.This is the part that dream merchants miss. We like our talent stories to go downhill, to speed up: the town, the bats, the records, the inevitable blue jerseys, the tip line. But what’s interesting about Sooryavanshi’s week isn’t its inevitability. This is friction. He’s too good to be left out and too disruptive to be included, and how that tension is resolved tells us more about him than it does about the men holding pens at the team sheet. The boy has done his duty. In the only words the chairman of the election committee could say, he chose himself. The question that remains is whether adults will have the courage to take action, or whether they will be cautious and wait for a gentler time to take on a friendlier adversary.I find I don’t mind too much where things are going. If he can play the Irish offense, we’ll see something happen. If he waited, the room they built would hold its breath for a few more days, and the record would remain, just like the record. My idea was to flatten it into a fairy tale, reducing a strange and unresolved moment to the usual treacle about a dream coming true.A boy from Bihar intimidated the board into building a room for him. Ultimately, whether he will be allowed to sit in there tomorrow is a smaller question than the question his arrival has already answered: The next one, the faster, stronger, younger guy we’ve been promised, isn’t coming. Here it is, fifteen years old, cushioned, waiting for the decision that is supposed to be beneath it.
