Day 1 of the Duleep Trophy final ended at 5:03 pm on Sunday in Chennai. As the players made their way into the pavilion after an extended third session, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi stuck around.
He walked towards a section of the Chepauk crowd that had spent the day chanting his name. Through the fence separating the stand from the playing area, spectators stretched out caps, notebooks, pieces of paper, jerseys — whatever they could grab — as Sooryavanshi made his way towards them. Basking in the appreciation, the 15-year-old obliged with autographs.
Around 12,000 fans had turned up at the MA Chidambaram Stadium on Sunday, filling the stands, with some even sporting Chennai Super Kings’ yellow. ESPN noted that half an hour before the start of the Duleep Trophy final between East Zone and South Zone, the lower stands in the C, D and E blocks had begun filling up. By 9:30 am, when the game started, those three stands, which the TNCA had opened for free, were packed.
The reason could not have been clearer.
Chepauk was gripped by Sooryavanshi fever. The spectators whistled, shrieked and roared through the morning as the teenager carved out an entertaining knock. Such was the craze that, by 10 am, the TNCA had opened three more stands for fans who had queued up outside the gates.
What made the scenes even more remarkable was that Chepauk was not originally scheduled to host the Duleep Trophy final. The match was supposed to be held at the Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Bengaluru, but was shifted to Chennai to make it accessible to the public.
“There are certain restrictions regarding crowd attendance at the CoE, and we felt it was appropriate to move the final to a venue where fans can attend and be part of the occasion,” BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia had said in a statement at the time.
Sooryavanshi did not disappoint.
He eventually got going against Mohammed Siraj, hitting the pacer for three fours and a six in 12 balls. But it took him until the sixth over to unleash that familiar range of shots — a long wait by Sooryavanshi’s standards.
South Zone captain Tilak Varma, in fact, tried to bait the 15-year-old into taking on the two fielders stationed at deep midwicket and long leg. Sooryavanshi resisted. Instead, against the short-ball ploy from the pacers, he targeted the vacant space on the off side between cover and point.
After initially negating the threat from the hard-length deliveries, scoring 11 off 14 balls, Sooryavanshi began to accelerate when the pacers changed their lengths. He cruised to 34 off 24 before helping East Zone stitch together a 100-run opening stand with Abhimanyu Easwaran.
But just as more and more fans began filling the venue, Sooryavanshi fell.
Backing himself to clear the rope against a rib-high short ball from left-arm pacer CV Milind, he went for the pull but only managed a splice towards deep midwicket. He departed for 44 off 37 balls.
Chepauk was stunned.
The fans who had come to see Sooryavanshi were suddenly robbed of their main attraction. Some of those who had arrived later began making their way out. But those who stayed were rewarded once again — this time not with another boundary, but with Sooryavanshi’s time.
He walked over to the stands and signed autographs for them.
The 44 may have been the number next to Sooryavanshi’s name on the scorecard. At Chepauk, however, the teenager had already made a much bigger impression.
