England vs India: Let Vaibhav Sooryavanshi debut in peace
Every press conference on this tour now has the same undercurrent. Somebody asks, in one form or another, when Vaibhav Sooryavanshi will finally play. Somebody in India’s set-up gives a version of “not yet.” And by the next game, the question is back again, a little louder than before.
It happened once more on the eve of the second T20I in Manchester, when India bowling coach Morne Morkel was asked, inevitably, whether the teenager might finally get a game at Old Trafford. His answer wasn’t a flat no. It was a more considered defence of leaving things as they are, built on the idea that faith shown to senior players matters as much as raw current form.
“I think we just need to also respect the fact that we’ve got the number one batter, or we had our number one batter in T20 cricket, Abhishek Sharma. You know, Sanju was the player of the T20 World Cup,” Morkel said on Friday.
While Ishan Kishan is the No. 1 T20I batter and Abhishek Sharma, No. 2, has done his reputation no harm, Samson has struggled. He has had scores of 5, 0 and 1 in the three T20Is on the UK tour so far. But, he remains the reigning Player of the Tournament from the T20 World Cup not long ago, a status built on an unbeaten 97 and back-to-back 89s when India needed them most.
Morkel’s larger point was about not letting a slump undo that trust overnight.
“He had a great IPL. So I think as a coaching staff, it’s only fair to show the faith and back your players,” he said.
“Yes, there’s a young man knocking on the door, and it’s exciting, but I reckon for not just those two players at the top, but for the rest of the group, it’s a good sign that we show that we back you guys.”
There’s a wider dressing-room logic buried in that last line, one easy to miss amid the Sooryavanshi noise: if the coaching staff drop a struggling senior player the moment an undeniably exciting youngster is ready to play, every other player in that dressing room notices, and files it away. Morkel seemed conscious of that, framing the decision less as being about Samson specifically and more about what continuity signals to the wider squad.
He was equally clear that Sooryavanshi’s readiness isn’t really in question.
“Just the way the guys have welcomed him, I think at the nets as a 15-year-old at the international stage, it can be intimidating. But just the couple of nets we’ve had, it’s been very impressive,” Morkel said.
“We’re all excited to see how he goes. And when he gets an opportunity, I’m pretty sure he’ll be ready.”
Put the two halves of Morkel’s answer together and the actual message is fairly simple, even if it took a few paragraphs to arrive: this isn’t about doubting Sooryavanshi, it’s about not wanting to be seen making a snap decision under pressure. Whether that’s the right call is a separate question. But it isn’t quite the stonewalling it can sound like in a soundbite.
THE CHATTER OUTSIDE THE CHANGE ROOM
Sunil Gavaskar has occupied a more interesting position through all this, arguing for Sooryavanshi’s inclusion while simultaneously warning about what a delayed debut does to a young player. Before the series against England began, Gavaskar was firmly in the “play him now” camp, arguing that England’s unfamiliarity with Sooryavanshi was itself a weapon India were leaving unused.
Once the team management showed no sign of changing course, though, Gavaskar’s tone shifted from advocacy to something closer to concern.
“It will put him under more pressure whenever he gets an opportunity,” he said on the first T20I broadcast.
“But at 15 years of age, you don’t think too much about pressure. He knows that if he gets the opportunity in the second or third game, he will have to deliver almost immediately.”
That’s the paradox sitting at the centre of this entire debate: the longer India wait, the stronger the case for playing him gets, but the heavier the expectation on his first innings becomes as well. Gavaskar isn’t contradicting himself so much as describing a trap of India’s own making.
Ravichandran Ashwin has taken the most contrarian route through the debate, and copped the most criticism for it. During the Ireland series, with Sooryavanshi still uncapped, Ashwin defended the youngster’s time on the sidelines in the most literal terms: carrying drinks.
“There is value in sitting outside and watching the game, too. Let him serve the team, help out, even bring water. There is a lot to learn from that experience,” he said at the time.
When that comment was read online as belittling a generational talent, Ashwin doubled down rather than walk it back.
“What I am saying is that carrying water is not degrading,” he said on his YouTube channel.
“Why do people think carrying water is a bad thing? When did the ethos of cricket change?
Strip away the online backlash, and Ashwin’s underlying argument isn’t far from what Gavaskar has been saying with more caution: that time spent inside a senior dressing room without the burden of performing is not time wasted for a 15-year-old, whatever social media makes of the optics of him with a water bottle in hand.
Where all three views converge, oddly, is on the idea that Sooryavanshi’s talent was never really the question. Nobody in this debate, from Morkel defending the status quo to Ashwin defending drinks duty, is arguing that he isn’t ready in a cricketing sense.
The disagreement is entirely about sequencing and optics, about when and how a debut should happen rather than whether it should. That’s precisely why the daily “will he play today?” ritual feels increasingly pointless. It treats a management decision as a cliffhanger to be resolved fresh before every toss, when in reality nothing in the substance of the argument has changed since Belfast.
There was a real opportunity to solve this quietly, in Ireland, in low-stakes conditions against a side ranked well below India, without 65,000 fans and a Test-strength attack watching his first international innings. That chance passed. India lost the series 0-2 anyway, with Sooryavanshi still uncapped, which rather undercuts Morkel’s continuity argument in hindsight.
But re-running that decision in public, series after series, doesn’t fix it. It just adds another layer of noise to whatever debut eventually arrives. Let the team management make the call, whenever they’re ready to make it, and let it be about cricket rather than crowd pressure by the time it happens.
WHAT TO EXPECT IN 2ND T20I?
India go into the second T20I at Old Trafford on Saturday with the series scoreline reading 0-0 after the Durham opener was abandoned following their 189 for 7. The XI could stay the same as that game — Sanju Samson, Abhishek Sharma, Ishan Kishan, Shreyas Iyer, Tilak Varma, Shivam Dube, Axar Patel, Harshit Rana, Arshdeep Singh, Ravi Bishnoi and Varun Chakravarthy — though India may look to swap out one of their three frontline spinners for an extra seamer in Prince Yadav, with the new ball expected to move around early at Old Trafford.
England have made two changes, naming their side early once again. Jofra Archer comes in, and uncapped seamer Josh Tongue will make his T20I debut, in place of Saqib Mahmood and Luke Wood. Phil Salt, who jarred his shoulder fielding in the first game, has been passed fit and returns at the top of the order.
OLD TRAFFORD PITCH AND CONDITIONS
Old Trafford has traditionally rewarded batters who survive the new ball, with some early seam movement giving way to a pitch that flattens out and turns increasingly batting-friendly as the innings progresses. The average first-innings score at the venue sits between 155 and 170, and results here have leaned towards sides batting first in recent years. AccuWeather has pencilled in a 25 percent chance of rain on match day, a number neither camp will want to dwell on after Durham.
WHEN AND WHERE TO WATCH THE 2ND T20I
The second T20I between England and India will get underway at Old Trafford, Manchester at 7 pm IST, which is 2:30 pm local time.
TV broadcast of the match will be available on Sony Sports. JioHotstar will provide live streaming of the game in India.
– Ends
