Vaibhav Sooryavanshi received what could possibly be the biggest compliment of his young career when he got compared to the legendary Gary Sobers. With comparisons to the great Sachin Tendulkar now a thing of the past, the most recent likeness has been drawn by former England batter Mark Butcher, who feels everything about Sooryavanshi’s batting is a chip off the old block popularised by Sobers.
Sooryavanshi is a six-hitting machine, riding the high of an uber successful year of top-flight cricket. With feats like becoming the youngest centurion in IPL, smashing hundreds in England, South Africa and Australia, and winning the Under-19 World Cup title to cap it off, Sooryavanshi couldn’t have asked for a better start to his professional career. Butcher, however, took it a notch higher by drawing batting parallels between him and the one and only Sir Garfield Sobers.
“The first thing that flashed in my head was Gary Sobers. The violence in the bat swing, the timing and the purity of the contact. The hand speed, the way that he uses his legs on the ground. The way that the bat literally follows through all the way around until it slaps him in the middle of his bat is pure Sobers,” Butcher said on the Wisden Cricket Weekly Podcast.
{{/usCountry}}“The first thing that flashed in my head was Gary Sobers. The violence in the bat swing, the timing and the purity of the contact. The hand speed, the way that he uses his legs on the ground. The way that the bat literally follows through all the way around until it slaps him in the middle of his bat is pure Sobers,” Butcher said on the Wisden Cricket Weekly Podcast.
{{/usCountry}}Regarded as the greatest all-rounder of all time, Sobers is considered the most complete cricketer to have ever played the game, and was the first ever batter to smash six sixes in an over playing for Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan in the year 1968. At first glance, the mere idea of mentioning Sooryavanshi, still 14, in the same breath as Sobers comes across as an amateurish statement, but Butcher backed his claim with some proof.
“I would urge people from a different generation who don’t have that picture of Sir Gary Sobers in the mind’s eye to seek out the video of him hitting the six sixes off Malcolm Nash. And just watch. And I swear to God; it looks exactly the same. He [Sooryavanshi] is just astonishing to watch. In terms of the way that he uses his legs to drive the bat swing. And the way that it keeps going until it disappears and slaps him in the middle of his spine is just pure Sobers,” added Butcher.
Sooryavanshi’s comparison to Sobers takes the mind back to Don Bradman’s immortal praise for Tendulkar, when he said, “I’ve only seen Tendulkar on the TV. I haven’t seen him personally because he hasn’t toured Australia. But I did see him play in the one-day games on television, and I was very much struck by his technique. And I asked my wife to come and look at him because I never saw myself play, but I feel this guy is playing much the same way I used to. There is a similarity.”