Vaibhav Suryavanshi has taken the cricket world by storm by playing arguably the most astonishing knock ever played by a 14-year-old in the history of the game.

The sheer intensity, scale and audacity of the innings by Vaibhav, who smashed a monumental hundred off just 35 balls and, in the process, became the youngest T20 centurion in history, has also now stirred a hornet's nest about what exactly is the right age to initiate a player into professional sport.

Such has been the impact of the incredible batting that Vaibhav showcased on Monday night at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur that it has now conjured up images of a then very young prodigy named Sachin Tendulkar, who fuelled the imagination of the country with his coming-of-age performance against Pakistan in Peshawar in an unofficial exhibition match on the 1989 tour.

The teenaged Mumbaikar had slammed Pakistan's Abdul Qadir, one of the greatest leg-spinners of the time, for four consecutive sixes that sent Indian media and fans into a tizzy then.

Tendulkar was 16 at that time, and his age made heads turn as much as his eye-catching and striking cricketing skills that defied it.

But again, he was still a 16-year-old. That makes the effort more plausible, or so it seems to observers now in hindsight.

Now, how about 14 years and 32 days when you play the biggest and the greatest breakout knock of your career, defying conventional notions of player maturity in the big, tough world of the Indian Premier League (IPL), which is exactly what Vaibhav........

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