Aaron George: India Under-19's Batting Spine, A Leader Without The 'C'

What’s common between Brazil legend Ronaldinho, Real Madrid giant Gareth Bale, the NBA’s ‘Greek Freak’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, Major League Baseball star Anthony Rendon, former world number one in men’s tennis singles Daniil Medvedev, Arsenal defender Ben White, and India under-19 cricketer Aaron George?

These are all excellent sportspersons – albeit proven to different veracities – who don’t love watching the sport they play on TV. They’d rather watch something else or simply spend time with their families and loved ones.

When any of them has said this on the record, the first reaction has usually been one of shock. It is seen as a sign of indifference, when it’s quite the opposite.

In most cases, it’s these athletes’ sheer competitiveness and

love for playing, of living their sport on the field so strongly that time away from it has to be calm. Others choose to give the sport so much space that it leaves little for the other important things in life.

Cricket has been George’s life since he was six, when he was gifted a plastic bat by a relative. Born in Kottayam, Kerala, before his family moved to Hyderabad, he was already in an academy by the age of eight.

George’s father Easo Varghese, a former district-level cricketer from Kerala who didn’t have the resources to make it any further (he became a sub-inspector and now works in a private firm), was the first to see the spark. But his mother Preethi (a Master of Maths and a teacher) and his sister Ananya (a lawyer), were equally supportive.

“When I was young, Didi used to bring her books to the academy and study while I was practicing because mom and dad could not come all the time,” George tells News18.

A few years ago, he met Biju Nair, a former coach with the Services team, who shaped his technique. It’s smooth like butter, low back-lift, everything with a straight bat, everything under the head, a lot of wristy work that is equal parts effective and elegant.

“I am not someone who has a lot of long sessions,” George says. “I keep it short and crisp as much as I can and bat for 1.5-2 hours on an average. Managing fitness has become very important now, so for me, usually, it’s skill in the morning and fitness in the evening.”

Observing a couple of AB de Villiers’ knocks, meanwhile, made him realise that composure and restraint from engaging with the opposition was the way to go.

At 16, he was selected to captain Hyderabad Under-16 in the domestic red-ball tournament, the Vijay Merchant Trophy, for the 2022-23 season. An unbeaten 303 against Bihar made headlines and he became a regular for all age-group tournaments.

In the next two seasons, he scored 341 and 373 runs in the Vinoo Mankad Trophy, the Under-19 white-ball tournament. In the latter, he led only the fourth men’s Hyderabad team to win a domestic title of any kind.

India Under-19 call-ups followed. He was the sixth-highest run-scorer at the recent Under-19 Asia Cup with 228 runs in four matches, with three fifties, at an average of 76, and has since been selected to India’s squad for the Under-19 World Cup in Zimbabwe in January-February.

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Standing out among the prodigies

Indian cricket is at a stage where it needs a stronger word for a ‘prodigy’. Every player representing the country at the Under-19 level now has skills at par with — if not better than — those who played dozens of senior international matches 20 years ago.

Even in the Asia Cup, several players had an IPL contract, with Vaibhav Sooryavanshi and Ayush Mhatre already starters for the Rajasthan Royals and Chennai Super Kings, respectively. When everyone around you is a superstar prodigy, standing out is difficult.

George does that with his maturity. In the first match at the Asia Cup, as the number three, he came to the crease in the third over and did his job by scoring a near run-a-ball 69, giving a belligerent Sooryavanshi the freedom to blast the UAE bowlers from the other end.

In the second game, against Pakistan, he had to be the protagonist after finding himself at the crease in the fourth over, with Sooryavanshi the one to get out this time. While George hung around, Pakistan kept chipping away with the wickets from the other end.

“I had to make sure that I stood through,” George says, with his 85 off 88 helping India register 240 on a difficult wicket, which was defended. “But another important thing was to maintain my strike rate, because it doesn’t matter if I play the whole innings and don’t take us through. So, my mind was also on scoring the runs even if wickets were falling on the other end. I knew I couldn’t keep it dead, and it was about picking safe options and making them bowl to my areas.”

He was rested against Malaysia before storming back with a Player of the Match performance in the semi-final against Sri Lanka. Here, too, India needed 139 in the rain-affected game of 20 overs/side, and lost both Sooryavanshi and Mhatre early and George struck a breezy 58 (49) in an unbeaten, match-winning partnership of 114 (87) with Vihaan Malhotra.

The final against Pakistan was the kind of game that everyone who has played cricket could relate to — one where everything that could have gone wrong, did. Where edges off your bowlers fell just short, and every false shot from your batter went into the bread-basket.

George looked brilliant for a nine-ball 16 here too, but mistimed a good bouncer from Mohammad Sayyam. India lost an emotionally-charged game by a huge margin of 191 runs.

The loss brought out the dark side of being a country of cricketing prodigies. These players, most of them still barely out of school, were berated in the media.

Some had their temperament questioned, while others had columns written on their names about how they needed to handle the ‘fame’ better, as if it wasn’t normal for teenagers to be emotional in a cricketing contest where they are being live-streamed. But listening to George makes you realise that some of these young adults are more grown-up than those writing about their mentality.

“Obviously, India-Pakistan is a big game,” he says. “It just can’t happen that we react as if it’s just another game. I am not talking about the players, but for the media and spectators. If it is India-Pakistan, then it is India-Pakistan. You have to accept that. But for me, personally, I just focus on my process, as at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if the guy bowling to me is from Pakistan or from another country. It’s ball vs bat. As a unit, I think the pressure didn’t really get to us so much because we kept discussing that we’d do our work and leave. But yeah, all of us didn’t play to our potential. Everyone made mistakes, including me.”

“The public is the public. When you win, it’s crackers all around, right? When we lose, we take it as part of the job. It’s nothing to complain about. I think it’s good we had a loss. Obviously, we’d face off soon (at the Under-19 World Cup) and we’d obviously learn and reflect on what happened,” he adds.

Asked if it helped that Sooryavanshi and Mhatre took most of the limelight, or if it was the opposite — they perhaps helped raise the level of the team by brewing healthy competition — George is similarly earnest.

“Whether there is limelight or not, we have to do our work,” he asserts. “That’s the bottom line. It’s not like we have to compete with them. Together, we are competing against other teams. I don’t have the time to compete with other teams as well as them! (laughs). We have a little more weight on our shoulders, that’s the last thing that comes across our minds… We want to win the cup for India, everything else is secondary,” he says.

George credits the Under-19 coaching staff for helping the cricketers stay level-headed, particularly by not feeding them too much information ahead of big games. Further, he says distance from social media and trying to only control the controllables cuts out the noise.

“I can only bat, I can only do my batting well,” he says. “Alone, I can’t win the game for my side. Alone, I can’t make people happy. It’s a team sport, we do our part.”

With the most fifties tournament, George managed to make a separate name for himself, as a technically sound player the team could trust to be its spine. His strike-rate, sixes and fours columns weren’t flashy, but that’s a credit to him for playing to the situation.

“I am confident that I have a bigger range of shots than what the world has seen in the Asia Cup,” he says. “It’s about the opportunity, what is the right thing to do in the situation because the team’s agenda comes first, apna jo bhi hai vo dekha jaayega (my needs are secondary).”

It helps that George has seen immense success as a captain quite early in his career. He loves the extra responsibility, thinking about the opponent, trying to stay one step ahead of them — in his words, said with half-laughter, “You stay in the game all the time, aaltu faaltu sochne ka time nahi milta hai (your mind doesn’t get the time to wander)”.

You don’t need a ‘(C)’ beside your name to be a leader. So far, George has shown that if you love leading, you’d do it whenever it’s required of you, whether it’s by helping the designated captain with ideas on the field, or when asked to carry the batting on your shoulders.

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Adaptation

These are interestingly brutal times for young cricketers.

To its core, they are all competing for and building towards 11 spots on the senior national team. Their competitors are hundreds participating in the IPL, thousands on the domestic circuit, and the 11-plus-four who make the squad at any particular series.

The Under-19 World Cup is no longer a clear indication of what the senior team’s future would look like — none of the last three editions’ India captains are in the IPL, let alone playing for the country. There’s no single way of finding success, not one tournament or format you could target to realise the dream.

“For me, personally, it is about adaptation,” George says. “Since I started playing professionally for our state or for India, it is about adapting to whatever questions are asked. If the system needs you to play the red ball well, you play the red ball well. If they need you for the white ball, you play the white ball the way it is supposed to be played. In general, we all want to play all formats. So in that, the preparation is also such that we are technically sound and are able to get the shots going in all directions.”

George makes it almost too easy to forget that he’s just 19. He loves playing basketball and table tennis, is great in academics, and is proud of being able to manage his second year in a Bachelor’s in Commerce degree decently, alongside cricket.

For now, though, with only a few days before he has to travel to Africa for a series against South Africa and then the World Cup in Zimbabwe, he is relishing every minute he gets with his family. He’s quietly envious of his friends who live the ‘normal’ college lives, but loves the fact that he’s doing a ‘very important job’ of representing India.

No matter what the columns said, or will say, of his batting in two weeks, the signs so far are clear that George has a very firm hold of his life’s plot.

“I don’t bat with a set target in my mind,” he says when asked about his immediate goals. “I don’t keep any expectations that I want to hit 500 or these many runs. I guess one expectation I will have is having good responses to the deliveries, making sure I am tactically on point, without any errors of judgment. If I get a good delivery and I get out, that’s fine, but I don’t want to be in a place where I read the situation wrong and make a mistake, because I am playing an important part as a number 3 batter. I don’t have any expectations quantity-wise; it’s only quality-wise.”