What a 14-year-old Instagram sensation and six-hitting superstar tells us about life and cricket | Barney Ronay
It’s that time of year again, a time of lists and countdowns, of soul-crushing AI brain-vomit ringed by adverts for miracle dental implants,In the spirit of the season the tech website Feedpost produced its own list on New Year’s Eve of the Top 100 Kid Influencers on Instagram And YouTube in 2025, and there’s nothing wrong with that,It’s fine and definitely not strange or creepy [narrator’s voice: it is strange and creepy],Don’t think about end times,Don’t think about plagues of woodlice, flames licking at your feet.
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it.I saw a 12-year-old influencer who loves fun fashion collabs.I saw a kitten in a waistcoat smoking crack from a milk jug.Don’t think about any of that.But I am going to say it.
The Top 100 Kid Influencers on Instagram and YouTube list is bullshit,Yes, Lil’ Buck McTucker has a HUGE personality and BIGGER dreams, plus unlimited exposure in a hostile adult space,And yes, the world famous Doodlebug Twins offer an uplifting tableau of precocious teenage empowerment,Everybody knows that,That’s not in doubt.
But these are all still second-raters and also-rans.Because cricket has now entered the chat.If you take this list as the elite, then the number one child influencer for 2025 is in fact Vaibhav Sooryavanshi of the Rajasthan Royals, who is still somehow only 14 years old, and who already has 2.3 million followers on Instagram, miles ahead, per capita, of any of these golden show-calves, and not far shy of the official England team account.Yes, cricket! Taking back the teenage weirdness.
Dominating the hyper-intense adult-child space.This is our house.Cry more Brock Cheesesteak, 11-year-old reality TV dance phenomenon.Actually, please don’t do that.But do remember to get independent financial advice from someone who isn’t your uncle.
And run, Brock, run as soon as you can.Sooryavanshi, from Bihar in Northern India, is in many ways the most luminous sports story of the past year.There are always prodigies in sport, but this kid really is something else.Scroll down the potted biography and every bullet point is a first, a most, a quickest.April 2025: scores youngest ever Indian Premier League hundred, off 35 balls.
December 2025: becomes the youngest male human to score a century in 50-over cricket.Also December: reels off a 95-ball 171 in the Under-19 Asia Cup.Only this week he was awarded India’s highest childhood state honour, usually reserved for achievements in science and culture, but here bestowed by Narendra Modi for the preternatural ability to smash length balls over mid-on.At the start of 2026 Sooryavanshi has the highest professional T20 strike rate of any male cricketer ever, a list that includes people called things like Tim David and Andre Russell, but also the full round of leathery 40-year-old South Africans who spend their lives windmilling through the powerplay for Latvia against Fiji.Currently he’s on his way to Zimbabwe for the Under-19 World Cup, which kicks off with India versus the USA on 15 January.
Then it’s on to the IPL in March, during which Sooryavanshi will turn 15 and become eligible to play for India’s senior team, possibly even in the T20I series in England in July.He is right now all promise, all potential energy, perfectly poised at the peak of his arc.And frankly this is the whole story of a sport, perhaps even the world beyond, right here caught in a moment in time.The first thing to say is that Sooryavanshi is undoubtedly the real deal, a breathtaking, state-of-the-art sporting talent.His method can look startlingly simple.
It is basically all a variation on one movement, hand, eye, balance, power, whip-crack speed, the same parabola, the same dreamy contact,Wheel him out and watch him go,This is all light, all talent, all grace,Should a 14-year-old really be playing adult sport, however talented that child might be? The obvious answer is no,Just because we can make money doing something doesn’t mean we should.
At which point: may I introduce you to cricket?But the Sooryavanshi phenomenon is also an explainer.If you want to make sense of the fractured nature of this world, to know why Melbourne was a two-day Test, then turn away from the public witch-dunking of a groundsman, the sad-looking men in chino shorts.And face this other centre of power instead, a place where a 14-year-old has already made his first half a million dollars, where the BCCI is running bone tests to fend off an age doping scandal, and where all the energy, all the gravity of this sport is ultimately located.Why don’t players have the skills to dig in for six hours? Why don’t batters spend an entire winter, as Graham Gooch once did, working solely on the position of the front pad in the forward defensive? Because of what the Vaibhav Sooryavanshi industrial complex is telling us.Every moment of prep, every childhood net, every act of macro-scheduling is directed toward the eyeball-harvesting shortest form, towards the IPL’s imperial power across the global summer, towards the drive to cram this thing into a six-inch screen, to make content moments, platform fodder.
Sooryavanshi was inevitable in many ways,The IPL is not just a star factory, but a nation building machine,India’s energy and light is reflected there,Here we have the boy from the rural northern village, with nothing but talent, will and a father prepared to take him 90 miles to Patna in the wee hours of the morning,It is beautiful but also sad, a Cinderella story that is a corollary to the brutality of India’s overclass-underclass life.
This is a nation that has embraced hyper-capitalism, which reveres its billionaires while carrying the burden of extreme poverty, where sport does its usual job of giving us stories of hope and social mobility that in reality prove the truth of the adage that poverty is good for nothing, except making sports people,Still, though, we have the spectacle,And from here you can’t help but want Sooryavanshi to keep doing this, to give us ever more extreme talent events,Even if there is a basic futility at the heart of this,In another world a talent this brilliant would be asked to express itself in a game of layers and gears, struggle, differing tempos and surfaces.
Instead, Sooryavanshi’s task is basically to do the same thing for ever, to replicate the same moment, hit the same sixes, keep cramming content into the machine, because all the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.Are you looking forward to 20 years of this? Maybe he can get better at doing the same thing.Maybe one day Sooryavanshi will hit every ball of an innings for six and cricket will be finished, morphed into an endless reel, a ceaseless pitch of noise.Or perhaps this is his time right now.You only get to be the first, the youngest, the newest once.
The brand power will never be so strong, the light so clear,At the centre of which there is still that basic human element, a preternaturally talented 14-year-old and the sense of a story happening in fast-forward; one that is, in is own way, the only story left,
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