India win U-19 World Cup: Meet the teen champions

Like all victories, it tells a thousand tales. It captures the unflinching supremacy India wields in the game and the dizzying depth of talent. This is India’s fifth junior title; their seniors are T20 champions, both global and continental.

At the stroke of the century, cricket was a great unifier, transcending the deep-rooted divisions of the society. Two-and-a-half decades later, it has evolved to such a stage that no talented cricketer slips out of the system.

In Samastipur, a star is born

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi scored the second fastest hundred in the history of the U-19 Cricket World Cup during the final match against England. (PTI Photo)

In a different milieu, Sooryavanshi emerging from Bihar’s Samastipur would have been imperceivable. The district ranks high on the High Multidimensional Poverty Status Index. His village, Tajpur, a speck off State Highway 49, does not have a Wikipedia entry. Google map throws up just a couple of government hospitals, a few temples, a petrol pump and two schools. The cricket academy in Samastipur only has basic facilities.

INTERACTIVE: Meet India’s U19 World Cup winners

Thrice a week, to foster his son’s cricketing dreams, his father Sanjeev would take the 10-year-old and his brother by road to capital Patna to train on turf wickets. At that time, the state’s cricket association had just been reintegrated into the domestic fold after decades of infighting. Still, splinter associations feuded. The turning point, quite early in his life, came when scouts of IPL franchise Rajasthan Royals spotted him during a camp.

Stupefied, they asked Sooryavanshi to attend trials, where the youngster pleasantly shocked Kumar Sangakkara, then team director and the legendary Sri Lankan batsman. “In 2023, one of the Rajasthan Royals analysts sent through a text saying there’s a very special player we need to watch, get to trials, and look to sign. And the first time I saw him live was after we had signed him, apart from watching some videos of him batting in the nets in Guwahati, batting against Jofra Archer and other seamers that we had. And he made it look very, very easy,” the Sri Lankan recollected in a Rajasthan Royals podcast.

Three years later, Sooryavanshi is a teenaged wonder of the cricketing world, redefining the perception of what a 14-year-old can perform. He is the side’s figurehead. He is already an IPL regular with a hundred, stardust and fanfare. The future looks incredibly bright.

There are, however, ample tales of self-demolition, to keep him grounded. For every success story of Kohli and Shubman Gill, there are cautionary tales of Unmukt Chand and Prithvi Shaw. A more damning stat: of the 179 cricketers who have played junior World Cups for India, only 52 have gone on to play international cricket. That is less than one-third of them. Worse, a third of them have not featured in more than 10 first-class games. Some have vanished without a trace – like the audaciously named Napoleon Einstein and marathon-innings man Vijay Zol. But then, some of India’s biggest cricketers of this century first announced their name in the U-19 circuit.

In Harare on Friday, February 6, every one was a success story.

Their fathers’ dreams

The theme of cricketers emerging from small towns of India has lost its novelty, but not the charm. New towns and villages keep entering the country’s cricketing map. Like Jujwa village near Gujarat’s Valsad, from where medium-pacer Henil Patel shot up. His is a tiny village of 3,240 residents. He had not bowled with a leather ball until he landed up at Bulsar District Cricket Association’s ground for a trial. But his strapping frame and the simple action sufficed for the coaches to pick him.

VIDEO | Patiala, Punjab: “Words fall short to express our joy,” says Manoj Malhotra, father of Vihaan Malhotra, on India’s U-19 World Cup triumph.

(Full video available on PTI Videos – https://t.co/n147TvrpG7) pic.twitter.com/TZkCR1iw65

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) February 6, 2026

Unlike Sooryavanshi’ father, Henil’s father could not afford to devote endless time to his cricket. “I didn’t know how things worked or didn’t have any VIP connections. I told him just to work hard, and he did that. He was fully committed to the game,” says his father Dilip, who works in a small private firm near Valsad.

BULAWAYO, ZIMBABWE – JANUARY 24: Henil Patel of India unsuccessfully appeals during the ICC U19 Men’s Cricket World Cup 2026 match between India and New Zealand at Queens Sports Club on January 24, 2026 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. (Photo by Johan Rynners-ICC/ICC via Getty Images)

Similarly, Gandhidham (Harvansh Pangalia), Kulana village in Haryana’s Jhajjar district (Kanishk Chouhan), Modasa in Gujarat (Khilan Patel), Kerala’s Thrissur (Mohammed Enaan), and Bihar’s Bhagalpur (Kishan Singh) all expanded the swelling boundaries of Indian cricket.

Fascinatingly, no two journeys on this map read the same. Harvansh’s father Damandeep Singh works as a truck driver in Brampton, a town near Toronto. The whole family shifted, but Harvansh stayed back to stoke his dreams. Damandeep tried to cajole him to Canada, but Harvansh remained firm. “He wanted to represent only India. He kept telling me, ‘I will fight it out here. If I have to play among the best, then it might as well happen here’,” Damandeep told this paper.

Mohammed Enaan was born in the Middle East, but returned home to pursue his dream.

Fellow batsman Vihaan Malhotra’s father is a Superintending Engineer in the Punjab Department of Water Supply and Sanitation. His mother is a practising doctor in Patiala.

Vihaan Malhotra of India celebrates their century during the ICC U19 Men’s Cricket World Cup 2026 Super Six match between Zimbabwe and India at Queens Sports Club on January 27, 2026 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. (Photo by ICC)

The parents enrolled Vihaan, a Virat Kohli faithful, at an academy because he was breaking one too many tube-lights at home and mirrors in his mother’s clinic.

VIDEO | “India won the Under-19 match today and the team performed very well. I am very happy with Vedant’s performance,” says Alpesh Trivedi, father of Vedant Trivedi, as he celebrates India’s U-19 World Cup triumph.

(Full video available on PTI Videos –… pic.twitter.com/CifFpRcbkW

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) February 6, 2026

Kishan’s father is a farmer in Bhagalpur. Team captain Ayush Mhatre’s father Yogesh lost his bank job during the pandemic but continued to support his son. Hyderabad batsman Aaron George’s father Easo Varghese, once a district-level cricketer, quit his police job and assumed a more flexible profile at a corporate firm so that he could pay more attention to his son’s cricket career.

Behind most boys is a father whose cricketing dream remained unfulfilled. Seamer Deepesh Devendran’s father, Devendran, was a hard-hitting batsman who was part of Tamil Nadu’s maiden Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy-winning group. But he joined the outlawed Indian Cricket League and burned his career. He has instilled in his son the wisdom he earned from his mistakes. “Since I came from a humble background, I didn’t know the nuances of the sport. Everyone made fun of me saying I lacked intelligence. I have made Deepesh into a thinking fast-bowler,” he said.

Chennai seamer R S Ambrish’s father R Sukumar was a promising all-rounder who captained Tamil Nadu in age-group levels and scored big at University level, but couldn’t resist a job offer from the Railways.

Sukumar moved to Railways because it offered him a job and security in life. “I probably lacked consistency… that’s why I couldn’t play higher-level cricket. So I’m just trying my level best to give him exposure. I couldn’t break the barriers, but he has already achieved what I couldn’t. He is stronger than me,” he says.

Most of the parents belong to a generation when cricket had just captured the nation’s imagination. Their dreams, however brief, of playing for the country had run up against lack of guidance, infrastructure, and exposure. Their dreams are now their children’s.

New battles, old pitches

The Virar to Mumbai commute takes around two hours in the local train. Captain Mhatre, often accompanied by his grandfather, would spend four hours on the train to fulfil his dream. The scramble to just sneak into the train with the kit itself is competitive. Mumbai cricket is more crowded with talent than passengers in local trains.

Every cricketer the city has produced would recount the struggles and wait to come through the ranks. “Just like you fight for space in the train, you fight for a chance to get noticed in Mumbai cricket, right from the age-group. It’s tough, but it toughens you,” Rohit Sharma once told this newspaper.

Team India players celebrate the ICC men’s Under-19 World Cup win against England in Harare, Zimbabwe, on Friday. (AP Photo)

Becoming a cricketer in the metros brings its own set of challenges. The competition is more intense. Unless someone is special, he is easily forgotten and becomes an afterthought. Once Mhatre, a Rohit fan, was depressed that he was not among National Cricket Academy’s top-30 probables. He knew the cure too. To work harder and refine his technique. The rewards manifested in the form of a first-class debut. The opener has hundreds in all formats for Mumbai.

His friend and teammate Abhigyan Kundu, who lives in Navi Mumbai, spent nearly as much time travelling. To prepare him for life’s hard realities, his coach Chetan Jhadav made him travel in unreserved train coaches, sleep at a railway station for a night, and share meals with players from far humbler backgrounds. His parents — father is an engineer and mother a doctor — would not interfere in his unusual paths, Jhadav insisted.

Aaron’s parents once had day time jobs. So they would tell his elder sister Ananya to accompany him to the academy. “When I was batting, she would be buried in books, preparing for exams,” Aaron told this newspaper.

Forever U-19s

During the pandemic, Tanmay Srivastava, the top-scorer in the 2008 U-19 World Cup final, started a WhatsApp group constituting 15 members of the winning team. The most famous among them were Virat Kohli and Ravindra Jadeja. Five others played for the country, too. Those in the group were now grown-ups, some of them parents, and Kohli had transformed into a legend. But as they chatted in the group, they turned teenagers again, cracking boyish jokes, bantering and dusting up old memories.

The tournament makes stars, it also forges lifelong bonds. In the same tournament, Kohli struck up a friendship with a pleasant boy from Sydney, Phill Hughes. Years later, just days before Kohli was to captain his country for the first time, a bouncer felled Hughes. He attended Hughes’s funeral in Macksville in December 2014, and said emotionally, “I think after attending the funeral I was as emotional and taken aback by the incident because Phil was one of the guys I used to interact with when he used to come on tours and even when I was in Australia,” Kohli had said.

“I was always closer to him than most of the guys. It was an equally saddening and emotional moment for me,” he would say. Rivalries too blossom. Three of the Fab Four of modern Test cricket featured in the 2008 installment – besides Kohli, Kane Williamson and Steve Smith.

Some of the teammates-friends would change the course of Indian cricket. Like Yuvraj Singh and Mohammad Kaif, the heroes of India’s maiden triumph, and later the architects of India’s Natwest triumph, a heist that is the Eden Gardens equivalent of ODIs. Yuvraj, man of the match in the final, became the man of the series in the senior World Cup a decade later.

The 2000 victory glamourised the junior World Cup and lent it an aura it never had in the country. Since then, every edition has produced a clutch of future India regulars; since then, India have won five of the 13 campaigns. Some of them from the recent group, India would hope, would become the torchbearers of the future. Some would blossom; some would wilt. But the tag would follow them for the rest of their lives. The victorious batch of 2026.