New Zealand head coach Rob Walter said he wants to see how Vaibhav Sooryavanshi would bat on pacy and bounce pitches on the upcoming tour. India will play five T20Is on the tour of New Zealand and Sooryavanshi will be cynosure of all eyes.

Sooryavanshi has batted with an aggressive approach in his young career. The youngster recently didn’t get any game time in the three-match T20I series against Afghanistan.

The 15-year-old recently scored 192 runs in five innings of the Duleep Trophy while playing for East Zone. Earlier, he scored 151 runs in three games against Zimbabwe after getting off to a slow start on the England tour.

Sooryavanshi had hogged all the limelight after he scored 776 runs in 16 matches of IPL 2026 at a blistering strike rate of 237.30 for Rajasthan Royals.

“Yes, I’d love to see him on some pace in bouncy wickets and see how different that looks. But he’s an exciting player. You’ve seen him dominate against the world’s best bowlers in the IPL. I think the challenge is always to see how that translates to different conditions and also how do we bowl to him in our conditions,” New Zealand coach Rob Walter was quoted as saying by The Times of India.

“Again, secretly as a coach, you always want to see your players under a little bit of pressure and how we respond to that. So looking forward to it, if that is the case. If he’s not here, they do have a lot of very good players other than him,” he added.

Walter also shed light on the wide-ball controversy in the historic one-off T20I against Japan.

“A very short segment (I watched). I saw there was some controversy around the wide ruling. But no, I didn’t watch a hell of a lot of it, to be fair. The lesser the better, I think,” Walted noted.

India registered a thrilling two-run win against Japan.