India Are Sending a Fifteen-Year-Old to Japan and the Calendar Doesn't Care
Orange Cap, MVP, Emerging Player, bedtime. Now a gold medal to win in a town nobody can find on a map, in the busiest month the sport has ever scheduled.
In this piece
The boy
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi was born in March 2011, a fortnight before the fourth IPL. He is fifteen. In this year's IPL he scored 776 runs for Rajasthan, won the Orange Cap, was named Most Valuable Player, and was named Emerging Player, which at fifteen is less an award than a medical fact.
He is now in India's men's squad for the Asian Games. Shreyas Iyer captains. Bumrah, Samson, Axar are in it. Men who were professionals when he was learning to walk. The tournament runs 24 September to 3 October at Korogi Sports Park in Nisshin, near Nagoya, a venue every cricket journalist in Asia looked up this week and will claim they always knew. India's quarter-final is on the 28th. He has school on the Monday. Probably.
Japan
The hosts' squad is captained by Kendel Kadowaki-Fleming and includes Reo Sakurano-Thomas, Lachlan Yamamoto-Lake, Ibrahim Takahashi and Alex Shirai-Patmore. The future of cricket is a hyphen. Pakistan's squad has Saim Ayub in it. So does Pakistan's Test squad for Edgbaston on the 9th. Birmingham to Nagoya is 5,800 miles. Either the PCB has a superb travel agent or a calendar with one page.
Nagoya is one hour ahead of Perth. First tournament in years I can watch at a time a doctor would sign off on. I intend to watch all of it, including Japan, with the fiancée asking reasonable questions and a cat asleep on the remote.
The calendar
The Asian Games are one of about nine things happening in the next five weeks. Edgbaston from the 9th. India v Afghanistan in Delhi, three T20Is, from the 13th, which the BCCI calls a warm-up for Japan. Delhi in September has never been a warm-up for anything. Australia in Zimbabwe from the 15th, for reasons. Sri Lanka in England from the 15th. Australia in South Africa from the 24th. West Indies in India from the 27th, three ODIs and five T20Is. Five. That's not a fixture. That's inventory, and inventory has to move. The County Championship ends on the 27th with three teams inside eight points.
None of it is for him. He's just in it.
What it's for
There's a polite answer and an honest one. The polite one is the Future Tours Programme guarantees every board its share. The honest one is every fixture above is a broadcast slot, and a calendar with no gaps is a calendar where somebody in every time zone can always find a live ball.
He has never known a version of the sport with an off-season. Famous at fourteen. Medallist or cautionary tale at fifteen. By sixteen the calendar will have found him eleven more things to do and a broadcaster to show them. Everyone is betting he can keep up. So far he can. Nobody has asked whether he wants to. Nobody asks. It's not that kind of sport.
Things I loved
- Japan's team sheet. Kadowaki-Fleming, Sakurano-Thomas, Yamamoto-Lake, Shirai-Patmore. A very successful exchange programme.
- Saim Ayub, picked for Birmingham and Nagoya in the same fortnight by two people who have not met.
- Nisshin. Every journalist in Asia, this week, quietly.
