While Vaibhav Sooryavanshi is taking the IPL by storm, Australia's own teenage batting prodigy and Sooryavanshi's Under-19 rival Ollie Peake is readying himself to take the step up to international cricket.
Peake, 19, appears set to become one of only six teenagers to play men's ODI cricket for Australia after he was selected for the upcoming three-match ODI tour of Pakistan.
They are different players from different cultures taking different paths to what seems like the same place, to be mainstays of their respective international teams over the decade to come. But despite likely making his international men's debut before Sooryavanshi does, Peake knows he still has a great deal to learn as he manages his development across all three formats.
"I don't think I'll ever be quite as powerful and have the bat speed of Sooryavanshi," Peake said on Wednesday. "But I guess I'm still figuring that out at the moment. How to flip between the formats and be able to jump straight back into red-ball after white-ball or vice versa. I think at the moment, for me, it has probably been easier going from red-ball into white-ball when your positions are all in good alignment and stuff like that, and I think now I'm starting to learn that my training can complement that by still playing proper cricket shots and getting myself in positions and then being able to extend from there. The foundations are probably the most important part."
Peake has long been identified as the future of Australian batting, even prior to his star performances in the Under-19 World Cup earlier this year. Australia's selectors took him on a Test tour of Sri Lanka as a development player before he had made his first-class debut for Victoria. They also picked him to make his List A debut for Australia A last year. His second first-class game was also for Australia A. Before the start of the last Sheffield Shield season, Peake had played more first-class games for Australia A in India than Shield games for Victoria.
His selection for Pakistan is a look to the future rather than a reward for dominant domestic form as Australia will be missing first-choice ODI batter Travis Head as well as Cooper Connolly due to IPL duty. Both will return for the Bangladesh tour that follows, and Peake will make way.
Peake has yet to score a professional hundred. He has four first-class half-centuries, two List A fifties and one BBL fifty with modest averages in all three forms, albeit his List A strike rate, 112.21, is excellent from a small sample size.
He admitted late in the Shield season that there was a big difference in facing Shield bowlers compared to those he scored twin hundreds off in the Under-19 World Cup.
But what the selectors see, as do many of his coaches and team-mates, is a player who is well beyond his years in maturity and cricket IQ, even if the raw output at the professional level isn't there quite yet. That is highlighted by his own reflections on what has been a rollercoaster 12 months of cricket.
"I think a lot of the stuff that I've learned in the last 12 months has been more around the mental side of the game and dealing with the different challenges, the ups and downs that are bound to happen along the way," Peake said. "Probably one thing was just being able to not chase good performances. Like keep trusting what I've done to get me here is good enough, and everyone misses out and has off days, and especially it seems like at the moment, as a [Shield] batter, it has been pretty tricky. So yeah, not trying too hard and not chasing it and not changing too much, just continue to get better at what I'm good at, and then go from there."
Although the raw performances haven't piled up just yet, there have been enough glimpses that he is in a different class to his peers. In just his second Shield game last summer, Victoria were 147 for 6 chasing 231 on a spinning fourth-day pitch in Adelaide against reigning Shield champions South Australia. Peake made 70 not out to guide his state home. A few months later in the BBL, on a difficult batting pitch at the Perth Stadium, he made 42 not out off 30 including nervelessly paddle-scooping the last ball for six to guide Melbourne Renegades home against eventual champions Perth Scorchers.
"He brings something different to the table," Victoria coach Chris Rogers told SEN last week. "[The] 70 on a spinning wicket [to] get it done, it was incredible how he problem-solved his way through. And that six he hit [in Perth] to get the Renegades home, it's those kinds of moments he seems to be able to step up.
"The game itself was pretty tough for him at different stages [last summer]. These pitches are hard to bat on. But he's showing that he has that kind of nous to problem-solve and figure out where he needs to get to.
"I think that this is a good opportunity to see where he's at. And you never know if someone can swim until you throw them in the deep end."
Peake himself spoke to the value of tours to the subcontinent with Australia's Under-19s, Australia A and the Test team in terms of adding layers to his game.
"I don't think I would have quite had that clarity in mind, and probably those options had I not been on a few of those tours," he said.
He is now trying to add more layers ahead of a possible ODI debut in spinning conditions in Pakistan. If he does play, he will likely have a role in the middle order and has already worked diligently over the past three weeks at Australia's training camps in Brisbane on adding options to his game.
"The camps have been awesome up here," Peake said. "We've been doing a lot of work on specific things, like playing spin in testing conditions, and adding different layers to the armory, whether that's sweeping or using your feet, all different types of approaches, and yeah, I guess all the technical foundations around all those things have been the biggest learnings, and yeah, it's nice to start to be able to implement that into training against proper bowlers."