Credit. X/@BCCI
Bengaluru: He’s as poised as MS Dhoni, and he finishes matches like the former Indian skipper. He’s as fit as Virat Kohli, and he has as much drive as the former Indian skipper.
Uday Saharan gets this a lot, and the narrative is gaining traction by the day as India’s Under-19 World Cup skipper goes about his job leading the side in South Africa.
Let’s unpack these assertions a bit before we get into how and why Uday has become the face of the next generation.
He does possess an eerie calm to him, the kind which comes from knowing that everything will work out in the end. He has shown that he can finish matches or at least change the course of the game coming at number 4. And he loves partnerships.
This could explain the Dhoni comparisons.
“Something in him changed after the 2022 World Cup in the West Indies,” Uday’s father Sanjeev Saharan tells DH. “He was travelling with the team as a reserve but he didn’t get a game. He had seen how the best do it so he came back humbled.”
He has effectively run his way to the top of the run-scorers chart with 389 runs in six games at an average of 64.83, within which he has scored only 120 runs in boundaries. And, he pipped an impressively fit Mandeep Singh (Punjab skipper) at a Yo-Yo test during Punjab’s Syed Mushtaq Ali camp recently.
As for the drive, Sanjeev describes it as ‘scary’. “… He upped his practice time soon after returning (from West Indies). He bats for hours and hours and doesn’t get tired. He hates losing. He also has this belief that he can win a match no matter what the situation.”
This could explain the Kohli comparisons.
Granted, Uday seems like a unique blend of traits from two of the best in the business, but it would be imprudent to put the 19-year-old through this game of comparisons. Also, time and again we have seen young players who have seen success at the Under-19 level crumble under the pressure of senior cricket.
“…not this guy," says Mandeep. “He’s destined for great things. He has a proper cricketing career ahead of him.”
Well, at least that will justify all the sacrifices Sanjeev has made over the years to ensure that his youngest child lives out a dream which he couldn’t sustain when he was in Shri Ganganagar in Rajasthan.
“When he was 11, we moved to Fazilka in Punjab so he could pursue cricket properly,” says Sanjeev, who is a BCCI level 1 accredited coach and an Ayurvedic doctor. “It was a two-hour journey by road every day but it didn’t feel like much because we always enjoyed these trips. Even those trips to Bathinda for matches would take so long but it was so much fun. He really liked those trips.”
Fazilka, interestingly, is also the village Shubamn Gill is from. Interestingly enough, Sanjeev is about as cricket-crazy as Lakhwinder Gill - Shubman's father. He also set up ‘nets' at home for Uday to keep honing his skills without having to deal with wildly fluctuating weather conditions, the kind that that region deals with often enough. Lakhwinder had done the same.
What these father-son sessions translated to was Uday picking up the art of defending at an early age. “I used to be called (Sunil) ’Gavaskar’ in my neighbourhood because no one could get me out. I knew how to defend very well, and I taught Uday the same things. With those fundamentals, he can’t do a lot wrong. Every shot he plays now is but an extension of the defensive technique we worked on from the time he was 10 or 11."
“Even now he says ‘why try hitting shots and going for glory when you can turn ones to twos and finish the job? I will hit when I have to, you relax’. The boy has always been like this,” he says.
Recently in an interview, Sanjeev, when asked what he would like for his son to do, emphatically said: “…just bring the Cup home.”
When asked if statements such as those would put too much pressure on the youngster, he said: “If he can’t handle expectations at this level, he can’t handle them going forward. He was built to handle pressure, and he will. We worked for this since he was a very little boy. Now is the time to execute. He will.”
Sanjeev sounds about as obsessed as a stereotypical cricket-crazy Indian father, but what he's actually trying to do is manifest a brighter future for his son.
After all, that’s what got them this far.