Vaobhav Sooriyavanshi at just 15 years and 99 days, has become the second youngest cricketer to play for a Full Member men’s team*, making his debut against England in Manchester. He enters a list of other precocious talents who had burst on to – and sometimes, gone away – from…
Vaobhav Sooriyavanshi at just 15 years and 99 days, has become the second youngest cricketer to play for a Full Member men’s team*, making his debut against England in Manchester. He enters a list of other precocious talents who had burst on to – and sometimes, gone away – from the international stage in their teenage years.
Hasan Raza (Pakistan), 14y 227d
Hasan Raza was a wonderful timer of the ball. He took the field against Zimbabwe before turning 15 in October 1996, and batted once, scoring 27 off 48 deliveries from No. 5. Doubts, however, later emerged about his age, and the PCB withdrew the claim that Raza was the youngest men’s Test debutant in the history of the game.
Whether he was 14, or 15 as some claimed, he showed tenacity at the international stage but without the results. He played just one more Test before the turn of the century, and then was dropped from the side. A recall in 2002 resulted in his only two Test fifties, against Australia – slow knocks of 54* and 68. However, he never quite found the same success as he did in first-class cricket, where he scored 13,949 runs in a 20-year career.
MohammadbSharif (Bangladesh), 15y 116d
Mohammad Sharif broke into Bangladesh’s national side in 2001 on the back of his impressive returns in the National League, as one of the rare bowlers in the country at the time who could get the ball to reverse swing. On debut in an ODI against Zimbabwe, he took 1 for 31 from his spell of ten overs, though Zimbabwe marched to a comfortable seven wicket win in Harare. Sharif lost his place in both the Test and ODI teams in 2002. The next year, he suffered a groin injury that required surgery, which was followed by a nine-month layoff and four years away from the national side. His stop-and-start, six-year career with Bangladesh featured just 19 international caps – and along with that, an unflattering bowling average of 79.00 in Tests and 42.40 in ODIs.
Mushtaq Mohammad finished with 3643 Test runs (Cricinfo)
Mushtaq Mohammad (Pakistan), 15y 124d
Allrounder Mushtaq Mohammad was a stalwart of the game in Pakistan by the time he was done. He was one of the five famous Mohammad brothers who emigrated to Karachi after the partition of India, and in March 1959, played for Pakistan for the first time in Lahore at 15. He went wicketless in a six-over spell against West Indies, specialising in legbreaks, googlies and flippers, and then scored 18 runs across both innings. However, his paltry returns on debut were not an indication of what was to come. He pioneered the reverse-sweep, played 57 Tests, and even captained the team in 19 of them. His 3643 runs and 79 wickets in the format for his nation, however, were dwarfed by the returns with Northamptonshire, which went on till 1985. By the time he was done in first-class cricket, he had scored 31,091 and taken 936 wickets, a big share of them with his county jumper on. Aaqib Javed (Pakistan), 16y 127d Fast bowler Aaqib Javed was on the receiving end of a Desmond Haynes century when he made his debut in an ODI against West Indies at just 16, in December 1988. He, however, escaped relatively unscathed in a spell of 1 for 49 from his nine overs. Through the years, he made a name for himself as a proponent of Pakistan’s trademark reverse-swing bowling. His biggest claim to fame was the spell of 7 for 37 against India in 1991 – record figures in a men’s ODI for almost ten years, which included a hat-trick where he took out Ravi Shastri, Mohammad Azharuddin and Sachin Tendulkar. However, he was perennially behind Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis in the pecking order. He got his chance to shine when he opened the bowling in their triumphant 1992 World Cup campaign, with Waqar out injured, and took ten wickets at an average of 29.81. He found most of his success with the white ball in hand, playing 163 ODIs for Pakistan, before his career ended in the late 1990s.
Sachin Tendulkar was India’s youngest debutant in men’s cricket before Vaibhav Sooryavanshi (Cricinfo)
Sachin Tendulkar (India), 16y 205d As Sooryavanshi gears up, he will be walking in the footsteps of Tendulkar, who made his debut in Karachi in 1989 . Tendulkar broke the India record for youngest debutant, which had previously belonged to L Sivaramakrishnan, who was 17 years old when he played against West Indies in 1983. Tendulkar – keeper of the India record for the next 37 years – scored a 24-ball 15 before being bowled by Waqar Younis. Tendulkar soon transformed from a precocious teenager to India’s big hope in the bleak 1990s, then to a senior pro who brought up a hundred centuries and became the game’s most prolific run-scorer. Even at the end of his career, he retained the ability to draw viewers in like no other. Sooryavanshi is at the beginning of his own career, but he possesses a similarly prodigious talent – and the ability to attract attention – as he debuts in Manchester. *When the list is expanded to men’s cricketers from all nations, the youngest is Marian Gherasim – he made his debut for Romania at 14 years and 16 days old , in a T20I against Bulgaria in October 2020. (Cricinfo)