Yashasvi Jaiswal has made the IPL 2023 season his own, scoring the competition’s fastest-ever fifty yesterday (May 11) having already registered a century.
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His batting achievements, however, are not limited to his franchise exploits in the last month. At 21 years of age he already has an enviable batting CV, and is only just getting started.
Jaiswal made his First Class debut in January 2019, when he was all of 18 years old. Batting at No.3, he scored a sedate 20 off 40 balls against Chhattisgarh in the first innings and was zero not out off two deliveries in the second, as Mumbai chased down a modest total of 91 for the loss of one wicket.
Nothing about his First Class debut suggested that he would end up becoming an all-format beast over the next few years, and yet, here he is today – with averages of 80.21 and 53.96 in First Class and List A cricket respectively. He also has a strike rate of 144.28 in T20s – banging the door to the national team harder and harder with every passing day.
Jaiswal first made headlines in the Mumbai school cricket circles in 2015 when he scored a triple hundred and took a 13-wicket haul in a Giles Shield match – the premier inter-school under-14 tournament in Mumbai. Since then, records have chased him like a shadow.
Everything Jaiswal touched in age-group cricket turned to gold. He was the highest run-scorer in the 2018 Under-19 Asia Cup, scoring 318 runs in four innings at an average of 79.50, including one hundred and two fifties. Then, a month after his First Class debut, he scored a scintillating 173 against a touring South Africa Under-19 team in a Youth Test that had Marco Jansen leading the bowling attack.
It was in October 2019, however, that Jaiswal made everyone stop and take notice. Having made his List A debut for Mumbai just a month back, he scored a double hundred against Jharkhand in a Vijay Hazare Trophy match, against a bowling lineup that had international as well as IPL bowlers like Varun Aaron, Shahbaz Nadeem, and Rahul Shukla. At seventeen years of age, he became the youngest double centurion in List A cricket history.
The 2020 Under-19 World Cup followed. Having already smashed records at the senior level in domestic cricket, Jaiswal had a lot of expectations on him and was arguably one of the most hyped cricketers heading into an Under-19 World Cup from India. And why wouldn’t he be? He had already secured a 2.4 Cr (Indian Rupees) deal at the 2020 IPL auction with Rajasthan Royals before the Under-19 World Cup. At the tournament, he didn’t disappoint.
Jaiswal scored exactly 400 runs in six innings in the Under-19 World Cup, at an astonishing average of 133.33. The next highest run-scorer in the tournament had less than 300 runs. In five out of the six innings, Jaiswal crossed 50, with his best knock coming at the biggest stage, in the semi-final against Pakistan, where he scored an unbeaten 105, taking his side to a ten-wicket victory in a run-chase of 173.
He followed it up with another impressive performance in the final, scoring 88 off 121 balls on a tough surface to bat, and took his team to 177. It proved not to be enough in the end, with Bangladesh winning the trophy. However, the foundation for Jaiswal was set and the world knew that India had a superstar ready to bloom.
Rajasthan gave him a debut in IPL 2020, which was delayed due to the pandemic. In his first major outing against senior, international players, he faltered. Scoring 40 runs in three innings at less than a run-a-ball, Jaiswal didn’t have the best of starts and there were murmurs that he didn’t belong at the top level.
With a gap of less than six months between IPL 2020 and IPL 2021, Jaiswal came back much better prepared. He got a chance in Rajasthan’s fifth game of the season, and this time he grabbed it with both hands. He gave consistently quick starts to his team, and on one fine night against Chennai Super Kings, he went berserk, scoring a 19-ball fifty, his first in the IPL, and the second-fastest by an uncapped player in IPL history at that point. He finished the season with 249 runs at a strike rate of 148.2.
Having had a successful IPL season for the first time, the next step in Jaiswal’s evolution as a batter would have been to prove that he was too good for the domestic level. That is exactly what he did in the following 2021-22 season.
He scored three hundreds and one fifty in six innings in the Ranji Trophy, with two of those hundreds coming in a semifinal against Uttar Pradesh and the fifty coming in the final against Madhya Pradesh. In the Duleep Trophy which followed, he ended up as the highest run-scorer, with two double-hundreds in five innings.
In such a short span of time, Jaiswal has aced all levels and all formats of cricket he has played. The current IPL season that he is having, feels like a culmination of everything he has achieved so far.
He currently has 575 runs in IPL 2023 at an average of more than 50 and a strike rate of 167.15. There have been only six other occasions where a batter has scored more runs at a higher strike rate than Jaiswal’s in any IPL season. This is also the highest aggregate of runs in any IPL season by an uncapped Indian batter, and the second-highest overall, after Shaun Marsh‘s 616-run season in 2008.
Players would consider their cricket careers as successful if they achieve one of the several milestones mentioned above. When you realize that Jaiswal has done it all before turning 22, and add his rags-to-riches background to go with it, it paints a picture that would put movie script writers to shame. And with a potentially long international career ahead of him, he is only just getting started.
