- Sooryavanshi’s 97 against SRH came at one of the highest strike rates we’ve seen in the IPL.
- The 15-year-old has scored his runs this season at a strike rate of 242.85.
- In this article, we look at the three innings with the highest strike rates in the IPL.
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi has continued to make quite the name for himself in the ongoing Indian Premier League season. Having come into the season on the back of an impressive IPL 2025, 15-year-old Sooryavanshi has had one of the all-time great seasons in the IPL. A sequence of words this writer could never have imagined penning down.
The left-handed prodigy currently holds the IPL 2026 Orange Cap, with 680 runs to his name. And unsurprisingly, those runs have come at an incredible strike rate. 242.85. He produced another swashbuckling innings against the Sunrisers Hyderabad, scoring 97 runs off just 29 balls.
Top 3 innings with highest strike rates (min. 20 balls faced)
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi hit five fours and 12 sixes on his way to 97 runs against SRH. More importantly for the sake of this article, considering a cutoff of at least 20 balls faced in an innings, he makes it to the top three innings with the highest strike rates in the IPL. Read on to find what place it comes in at.
Yusuf Pathan – 327.27 (KKR vs SRH, 2014)
In 2014, the Kolkata Knight Riders were among the best teams in the IPL. They had won the 2012 edition and were chasing a second title. The 2014 season didn’t see them start off as well as they would have liked. But five wins in a row to end the league stage had brought them within touching distance of the top 2 finish they needed to finish in the Qualifier 1 places. They needed to chase down SRH’s 160 runs in 15.2 overs or fewer.
Enter Yusuf Pathan. The explosive all-rounder walked in with KKR at 55-2 in the eighth over. He hit five fours and seven sixes in a little more than half an hour to end his innings on 72 off 22 balls. A strike rate of 327.27. As a result, KKR had chased the target down in 14.2 overs, qualifying for Qualifier 1. They went on to win Qualifier 1 and the final, to go home with the title for the second time in three seasons.
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi – 334.48 (RR vs SRH, 2026)
Having snuck into the playoffs, the Rajasthan Royals were up against it with their eliminator versus Sunrisers Hyderabad. SRH had barely missed making the top 2 in spite of winning just one of their first four matches this season. They ended up winning eight of their next 10 matches, including two big wins over RR, to comfortably qualify for the playoffs.
Not this time though. 15-year-old Vaibhav Sooryavanshi would not have it. Sooryavanshi attacked all the SRH pacers with equal disdain and took the ball away from them from ball one. In the process, he also overtook Chris Gayle’s (59) tally for most sixes in an IPL season, currently sitting at 65 sixes for the 2026 campaign.
Batting on 97 off 28, the youngster found himself one hit away from the fastest T20 hundred in century. Unfortunately, his top edge found Ravichandran Smaran at third man. However, his innings was enough to find its way into this list. His 29-ball 97 meant he finished with a strike rate of 334.48.
Suresh Raina – 348 (CSK vs KXIP, 2014)
Kings XI Punjab had set the Chennai Super Kings a target of 227 in 2014’s Qualifier 2. Surely, that was a little too high a target? Especially considering that this was a knockout match.
Well, it looked a lot easier from 100-2 after six overs. Yes, 100 runs in the powerplay in 2014. Until then the highest team score in the powerplay was 86, and Suresh Raina had scored 87* in the first six overs that day.
Walking in after Faf du Plessis had been dismissed for a first-ball duck, Raina went after the Punjab bowling immediately. It was a pace takedown of the highest order, with the left-hander going after Mitchell Johnson, Sandeep Sharma and Parvinder Awana.
Over the course of his innings, he hit 12 fours and six sixes. That is a total of 18 boundaries in the 25 balls he faced for his 87 runs. His strike rate of 348 that day is still the highest in any IPL innings that has lasted at least 20 balls.
However, that innings would not win CSK the game unfortunately. Brendon McCullum called for a quick single off the first ball after the powerplay and some hesitation saw George Bailey run Raina out. And then the chase eventually fell apart, with KXIP winning by 24 runs.
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