Welcome to the Machine

Where have you been?

Last night, the Indian Premier League began its eighteenth season. Seventeen years have swept past since that Bangalore evening when cricket dressed for a Bollywood dandiya night, spectators sat bewildered, and Brendon McCullum, bat swinging like a rapier, essentially announced: “Welcome to the future, you lazy boomers!”

It feels so strange to think that this tournament, now cricket’s gravitational centre, began as an entertainment product where cricket married Bollywood. Thankfully, it shed that sequined jacket fast. Someone mercifully realised that the sport could sell itself without daily interviews with actors whose primary qualification was emerging from the correct womb.

On most days, the IPL got the cricket bit right. One of its earliest taglines was, “where talent meets opportunity.” It came good on that promise, by design. It placed Kohli alongside Kallis, had Jaiswal striding out with Jos, got Pant to develop under Ponting’s tutelage. Everyone passing through these gates emerges strengthened. If and when Jasprit Bumrah writes an autobiography, expect a passage dedicated to Lasith Malinga.

The IPL has now been alive long enough to see through the turn of a generation. Most players from the first batch are coaches today. They have traded flannels for clipboards, their hair thinner, voices gentler. When Dale Steyn speaks with twinkling eyes about some new fast bowling prodigy, you can’t help but experience temporal whiplash. How is this gentle surfer the same demon who turned batting into an extreme sport?

A few years back, I saw a pre-season picture of Ricky Ponting guiding Prithvi Shaw’s net session, and almost quote tweeted it with, “Thank you, Lalit Modi.”

But, even Ponting and Steyn are having to keep up with how quickly the IPL, and T20 cricket, is gaining muscle. It is almost unrecognisable from the infant version they all partied with.

In one game last season, Sunrisers Hyderabad scored 277 in their 20 overs, which was more than the first innings score in every Men’s 50-over World Cup final played since the tournament’s inception. Their opponents on the day, Mumbai Indians, probably named after a few too many shots of buttermilk, now have satellite teams in Cape Town, UAE, and New York. There is an actual team called Mumbai Indians New York - completely normal stuff.

In the middle of this growth spurt, of a nation and its favourite child colonising cricket like a Victorian-era fever dream, the Rajasthan Royals have signed a 13-year-old. That is not a typo. A human who still might believe in tooth fairies will now share a locker room with men who have mortgages and children.

Actually, no, Vaibhav Suryavanshi does not believe in tooth fairies. He believes in dispatching bowlers nearly twice his age beyond boundaries, sometimes beyond stadiums entirely.

In September last year, he scored a 58-ball century against the Australia under-19 team. Later, in the Vijay Hazare Trophy - India’s domestic 50-over competition - he whacked Test bowlers for fun. In December, at the Under-19 Asia Cup, Suryavanshi scored 76 off 46 balls against UAE, and 67 runs from 36 balls against Sri Lanka in the semi-final. And he is already a year into his first-class career, having made his debut for Bihar when he was 12.

What were you doing at thirteen? I was scheming elaborate tiffin-exchange programmes, secretly hoping my voice doesn't crack mid-sentence in science class, and spending hours contemplating whether my Disney Tazo collection¹ will somehow translate to future wealth. That’s…normal, right?

How have we crash-landed in a world where a thirteen-year-old is playing in the Indian Premier League? Is the coach going to cup his eyes every time Rajasthan Royals hit a boundary and a group of cheerleaders start dancing?

The idea, of someone so young taking guard as Jasprit Bumrah or Mitchell Starc stand at the top of their run-up, is simultaneously thrilling and scary. So much can go right, and just as much can go wrong.

***

As a Manchester United fan, jealousy comes easy to me these days. When your team resembles expensive LEGO pieces assembled by a sugar-junkie toddler, when they discover innovative ways to concede goals every week, jealousy becomes a mere appetiser in a buffet of despair. I am jealous of everyone who has a competent team.

These days, I am most jealous of Barcelona. It’s not just for their recent form – advancing to European quarter-finals, mounting a domestic title challenge, producing football that quickens the pulse. This Barcelona squad features a full constellation of young, skilled, consistent footballers – all nurtured in-house.

A couple of years back, Barcelona were in a financial pit. They owed various creditors nearly half a billion dollars. Players were sold en masse, and adequate purchases were impossible. So they went back to their development pipeline - their pride and identity for decades - and fast-tracked a few decent talents.

One of them was Lamine Yamal. Those within an earshot of Barcelona’s youth teams had been singing his praises for a while, but suddenly, almost without warning, there he was—walking onto the pitch for his senior debut at just fifteen years of age.

Lamine is the kind of footballer who makes knees wobble. Not of defenders trying to stop him, but of fans watching him. He receives and turns with a languid ease, almost Thierry Henry-esque; he is lightning quick when he gets going; and the ball sticks to his feet all the time as if his boots were made of velcro.

It’s worth disrupting your sleep cycle to watch Barcelona games starting at 1am, because you get to watch Lamine at full tilt. He is yet to turn 18, and the word “Messi” gets uttered around him every other week. It helps to be a left-footed wizard wearing the famous red-and-blue, but the comparisons would’ve come regardless of the colours of his jersey.

Look, talents like Lamine Yamal are unicorns, so there is no point in wishing your team could generate one, but you’ll notice something else when you watch him or his late-teens-early-twenties teammates play: their extraordinary commitment. They run relentlessly, exhaust themselves completely, pursue opponents with predatory focus. A couple of years back, Lamine’s teammate, Pedri, played more than seventy high-intensity games in one season, had a long-term injury that ruled him out for months, and then came back to the same routine as soon as he got the medical green light, as if he was duty-bound to give his body to this cause.

Every time you watch these guys, you are simultaneously mesmerised by their technical skill and the amount of dirt they’re willing to get on their bright shirts. That, is what I wish I saw more of at Manchester United.

La Masia, Barcelona’s youth academy, was formally set up in 1979, in an eighteenth-century cottage in the outskirts of Catalunya. The cottage used to be a club office, but eventually became the centre for youth development, and a dormitory for young trainees who came from distant cities. At La Masia, children from the age of 9 and 10 are taught the Barcelona way of playing: combining deep technical skill with tenacity and versatility. They live the dream life of every Catalan kid, and are taught to channel that pressure into drive.

Ever since its establishment, La Masia has provided Barcelona not just contingency but a pipeline of elite talents forming their team’s foundation. The roll call of graduates is pure football royalty: Pep Guardiola, Andres Iniesta, and a diminutive Argentine named Lionel Messi; Xavi, Carles Puyol, Cesc Fabregas; Pique, Busquets…you get the point.²

For a long time, building commitment towards your sport was actually quite easy if you liked it enough. As a footballer, you were just that - a footballer. All a young athlete wanted was to emulate what they were seeing the senior pros do on the pitch.

That’s not the case anymore.

There has never been a tougher time to be a young athlete than today. Just this Tuesday, ex-England men’s team coach Gareth Southgate spoke with warmth, empathy, and genuine worry about the environment that surrounds most young achievers, especially males. Delivering the Richard Dimbleby lecture, he addressed every tentacle that is waiting to pierce into the ambition of a young talent.

“There’s one topic that keeps being brought to my attention. And it’s parents who keep raising it. Young men are suffering. They are feeling isolated. They’re grappling with their masculinity and with their broader place in society,” Southgate said. “They spend more time online searching for direction and are falling into unhealthy alternatives like gaming, gambling and pornography.”

“And this void is filled by a new kind of role model who do not have their best interest at heart. These are callous, manipulative and toxic influencers, whose sole drive is for their own gain. They willingly trick young men into believing that success is measured by money or dominance, never showing emotion, and that the world – including women – is against them. They are as far away as you could possibly get from the role models our young men need in their lives.”

In an interview with The New York Times, former La Masia director Aureli Altimira spoke about how Barcelona prepares young footballers for a life unlike most of their peers.

“Kids have to deal with a lot of pressure during their years at La Masia. The academy has its own psychological services, designed to provide the kids with tools to deal with tough situations, how to handle scenarios such as breaking into a better team. How to behave in good moments and bad ones. The ones who stay and go through several age groups end up being stronger mentally. They know how tough it is — and they know our idea of playing by heart.”

***

There is something deeply compelling about watching a young artist push boundaries. It could be Lamine Yamal gliding past defenders twice his age, or a young pianist nailing Flight of The Bumblebee at 200 beats per minute, something stirs within us every time a wunderkind floats up into our orbit.

Perhaps we see a great purity in their expression. These flowers bloom without the weight of expectation or failure that accumulates over years of professional life. They play with an instinctive joy, a natural relationship to their craft that seems untarnished by calculation or caution.

These prodigies disrupt our understanding of time and development. They bypass the years of struggle that we assume necessary, arriving fully formed at destinations others spend decades pursuing.

This IPL contract means Vaibhav Suryavanshi won’t experience a normal adolescence. No silent metamorphosis for him, no gentle unfurling of teenage wings. He is already clickbait, content, currency. Rajasthan Royals’ captain faces questions about him every day, coaches get asked if there’s a chance he can get a few games, Dhoni speaks of him in advertisements. Two thousand words in this essay later, we’re also an audience to this show.

And that’s a tightrope beneath which lies an abyss. How do you handle a comet like this? How do you create a culture which maximises opportunity and ability?

For every Kohli, Pant, and Yamal, there is the story of Prithvi Shaw. Captain of a World Cup winning under-19 team; century on Test debut while he was still a teenager; christened as a throwback to Sehwag, Lara, and what not; runs in the IPL, runs in Ranji Trophy, runs everywhere. And boom!

A nosedive off a cliff, where neither fitness nor runs could be expected of him. This one time, a commentator sitting hundred metres away was able to predict the exact way he will get out. At the most recent IPL auction, none of the ten franchises wanted to take him onboard, even at base price; and he has been axed from his state team too.

Shaw is still 25, and has an entire career in front him, but something in the middle has gone wrong. It’s a personal failure to a large extent, sure, but it is also a red dot for the ecosystem that couldn’t arrest the slide in time.

The world will give Suryavanshi less room than perhaps he deserves. We’ll soon forget his age—criticism rarely accommodates nuance. Those orbiting cricket’s periphery will extract meaning from his every utterance, critique his purchases, and await the slightest indication this 13-year-old has lost drive early because money arrived too soon; that, far from being the next child-prodigy, he’s the next Shaw.³

But, if fate had to choose a first chapter, Rajasthan Royals seems written in fortunate ink. For a year now, the Royals have operated three youth academies in India functioning independently of IPL operations. In Siddhartha Lahiri and Zubin Bharucha, they have experienced directors with proven histories of transforming young talents into serious cricketers.

Inside that dressing room sits inspiration with a face: Yashasvi Jaiswal. Once promise, now proof. Vaibhav need only observe Jaiswal’s trajectory from precocious talent in 2020 to batting cornerstone for both Royals and India’s Test team in remarkably brief time.

And then, there is the head coach, one Rahul Dravid, who knows a thing or two about maximising every gram of talent - both within and of teams he’s in charge of.

It is entirely possible that Vaibhav Suryavanshi doesn’t play this season, perhaps not even next. Despite his clear talent, the next step might prove steeper, elite cricket’s challenges momentarily overwhelming. Or he could be closer to the final product than we think. Either way, I only hope Rajasthan becomes a sanctuary for him, and that he is the first entrant into a long assembly line that enriches Indian cricket with a culture of excellence.

The IPL at eighteen is still theatre, spectacle, fireworks. It now has a chance to add a wing, to become something more profound: India’s finest laboratory of excellence, its most sophisticated incubator of talent.

1. I may or may not have made friends depending on if they’d let me borrow their tazos.

2. One Barcelona player, not from the academy, who played with some of these guys is called Miguel Angel Nadal. I wonder why that name sounds familiar.

3. English football has entire laundry list of such stories. Young, mostly non-caucasian, footballers being made to sound like thugs because they lived the life of normal young adults.