the new double centurion ~ welcome to Yashasvi Jaiswal

Those days, Ashok Mankad would bring in unknown players for Mafatlal / Nirlons and would win Buchibabu tournament by sheer batting performance.  Mumbai has always produced classy batsman – Vijay Manjrekar, Vijay Merchant, Chandu Borde, Ashok Mankad, Dilip Sardesai, Ajit Wadekar, Salim Durrani,  Sunil Gavaskar, Farokh Engineer, Eknath Solkar,  Dilip Vengsarkar, Sandeep Patil, Ravi Shastri, Sanjay Manjrekar, Praveen Amre, Sachin Tendulkar, Vinod Kambli,Rohit Sharma Ajinkya Rahane, Prithvi Shaw ~ Amol Majumdar, Wasim Jaffer  … and … more … and the latest sensation in that list could well be ‘ Yashasvi Bhupendra Kumar Jaiswal’.   ~ he is in news today.

Vijay Hazare Trophy, the Ranji One-Day Trophy, that was started in 2002–03 as a limited-overs cricket domestic competition involving state teams from the Ranji Trophy plates is now on. It is named after the famous Indian cricketer Vijay Hazare.  Tamil Nadu is the most successful team having won the trophy 5 times. Mumbai are the current champions(2018-19) who won their 3rd title beating Delhi in the finals. Vijay Hazare  captained India in 14 matches between 1951 and 1953. In India's 25th Test match, nearly 20 years after India achieved Test status, he led India to its first ever Test cricket win in 1951–52 against England at Madras, winning by an innings and eight runs in a match that began on the day that King George VI died.

Length balls rear dangerously to crash into batsmen's helmets, full deliveries jump to hit elbows, a length ball from an offspinner flies over the wicketkeeper's head, and short balls roll through along the ground - welcome to Vijay Hazare Trophy action in Vadodara.  It's the latest dampener in an already long and exhausting group stage that has seen multiple washouts, several rounds of rescheduling, and player statistics being revoked for incomplete matches.  Vadodara's Moti Bagh Stadium surface, on which Maharashtra were bowled out for 65 on Wednesday, has come in for special scrutiny. Even Punjab lost four wickets before they knocked off the target. At the same venue on Sunday, Odisha were shot out for 73, with deliveries scooting low or "jumping off patches from which the top surface came off", according to an Odisha batsman.  Wasim Jaffer, Vidarbha's senior batsman and Ranji Trophy's highest run-getter, who has played around India for the last 25 years, expressed disappointment at the state of affairs. "If Jasprit Bumrah, Umesh Yadav or any fast bowler over 140 clicks were available and bowled on these surfaces, many batsmen would've been injured and their seasons would've possibly ended, he added.

Away, 17 year old  Yashasvi Jaiswal became the youngest man to hit a List A double-century, finishing with finishing with 203 in 154 balls against Jharkhand in the ongoing Vijay Hazare Trophy.

The Mumbai opener is the second to double up this season after Sanju Samson made history less than a week ago, scoring 212 not out. It was his his first List A century - for Kerala against Goa - and it was also the highest individual score in the competition, going past Karn Veer Kaushal's 202 for Uttarakhand against Sikkim last season, the first time a double was scored in the tournament. Jaiswal has now joined Samson and Kaushal in the list. "Jaiswal's 154-ball innings included 17 fours and 12 sixes. That's 140 runs in boundaries."

Of the nine double-tons in List A cricket by Indian batsmen, five have come in ODIs: three by Rohit Sharma, and one each by Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag. Those aside,  Shikhar Dhawan made 248 for India A against South Africa A in Pretoria in 2013.

Opening the batting against Jharkhand in Alur with Aditya Tare, Jaiswal outscored his more experienced partner as the two put on 200 runs for the first wicket in 34.3 overs before Tare was dismissed for a 102-ball 78 by Anukul Roy. Jaiswal continued to score quickly, as Siddhesh Lad contributed just 32 in the second-wicket stand of 105 runs, and went on to reach the double with captain Shreyas Iyer by his side. He did briefly threaten Samson's mark of 212 but fell with two balls left in the innings when he was caught by Rahul Shukla off Vivekanand Tiwari, who had earlier dismissed Lad.  Cricinfo reports that for the prodigiously talented Mumbai teenager, it was a third century in five Hazare Trophy games this season after 113 against Goa and 122 against Kerala.

Jaiswal first came in the spotlight during the Under-19 Asia Cup in Dhaka in October last year, when he scored a 113-ball 85 in the final as India beat Sri Lanka by 144 runs. That capped an excellent tournament for him, in which he topped the charts with 318 runs. More recently, at the Under-19 tri-series in England in July-August this year, where Bangladesh were the third team, he scored 294 runs in seven innings at an average of 42 and a strike rate of 74.05, finishing fourth on the run-scorers' list. He hit four half-centuries then, including a 72-ball 50 in the final, when India beat Bangladesh by six wickets.

His achievement is all the more laudable given the face of adversity ! ~ media reports suggest that back in 2012, an innocent 11-year-old boy arrived in Mumbai with a dream of playing cricket for the country. He lived in a tent with no toilet facilities, sold panipuri to sustain himself and would go to sleep without eating for days on.   It is that boy who has represented India in  U-19 and has now become famous with that double ton.  Son of a shopkeeper in Bhadohi, Uttar Pradesh, Yashasvi was only 11 when he moved to Mumbai to pursue his passion for cricket.

Best of luck to this exciting Cricketer

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

16^th Oct 2019.