Yashasvi Jaiswal

From his Under-19 days, Yashasvi Jaiswal has come to embody fearlessness and a robust batting approach, to which he has also managed to add consistency, as his record in the IPL and in domestic cricket for Mumbai in the early 2020s shows.

At 12, Jaiswal moved from rural Uttar Pradesh to Mumbai for cricket. He slept in tents and sold pani puri to earn pocket money. When Jwala Singh, a local coach, took him under his wing two years later, after watching him at Azad Maidan, Jaiswal's career began to take off.

In October 2019, in the Vijay Hazare Trophy, the 50-overs domestic competition, Jaiswal racked up scores of 113, 22, 122, 203 and 60 not out, his run only coming to an end when rain knocked Mumbai out of the competition. The following year, he was India's batting mainstay in the Under-19 World Cup in South Africa, where he was the Player of the Tournament and the team finished runners-up. That paved the way for a big payday at the IPL, where he was signed for Rs 2.4 crore (about US$ 338,000) by Rajasthan Royals.

The step up from tearing apart domestic bowlers and lording it over U-19 attacks wasn't quite smooth, but hard work and long hours spent working on his technique and skills at the Royals academy when training opened up after Covid helped his confidence, Jaiswal said. In his first full Ranji Trophy season, 2021-22, he made three successive hundreds in Mumbai's run to the final.

At Royals, where he was retained ahead of the 2022 season, Jaiswal has formed a fearsome opening combination with Jos Buttler. In the 2023 IPL, he set a new record for the fastest fifty in the tournament's history, off just 13 balls.