Vaibhav Suryavanshi has been phenomenal in 2025.
Rajasthan Royals (RR) are known for using extensive data to monitor and work on improvements, with several players crediting them for their success in recent years. They have given several young players a platform, and the prodigy Vaibhav Suryavanshi has been their latest find.
Vaibhav’s talent was palpable right from the initial days, and RR had no doubts over picking him in the IPL 2025 auction, but he still needed to work on his technical side to compete at this level. On Cricbuzz, Rajasthan Royals’ Director of Strategy & Analytics, Giles Lindsay, explained how one of their tools, Str8Bat, a sensor to analyse batting performance, helped them to improve a major technical aspect of the prodigy’s batting.
“We knew when we first saw Vaibhav Suryavanshi before the auction last year that he had an exceptional bat speed of 95 kilometres per hour, but his timing efficiency could improve. Through some focus work with Vikram Rathour (and the bat sensor – Str8bat), he actually increased it by 12% over four months at our high-performance centre before the start of IPL 2025.”
The work done was visible straight away in the previous IPL season, where Vaibhav Suryavanshi scored 252 runs at an average of 36 and a strike rate of 206.55 in seven outings, with one fifty and a century. The most notable aspect was his expertise in finding boundaries: he hit 18 fours and 24 sixes at a balls-per-boundary ratio of 2.90.
That Vaibhav Suryavanshi aced his maiden IPL season at just 14 doesn’t surprise, given the immense potential he always had. However, Rajasthan Royals deserve equal credit because they worked with him at their high-performance centre much before the start of the season, as Lindsay himself revealed.
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The biggest point of Vaibhav’s batting has been his superior boundary-hitting ability, for the southpaw has mostly dealt in fours and sixes in every tournament. That has only been possible due to the work done on his timing efficiency, for it allows him to hit the shots at the right time by synchronising bat speed with the ball’s arrival.
This could have been an issue at the IPL level had Rajasthan Royals not worked on it, because Vaibhav Suryavanshi has a high bat speed, which could have reduced him to a mere slogger with certain issues against off-pace deliveries. But the timing efficiency allows him to control it and delay his swing by focusing more on the ball type than blindly swinging at everything.
That’s helped him become more nonchalant with his boundary strokes, and he can’t be restricted with slower deliveries into the pitch to an extent now. Vaibhav Suryavanshi will show more loopholes in his batting as he plays more, and Rajasthan Royals will likely ensure he keeps overcoming those issues with their advanced data and performance tools.
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