A World Cup hero, captained Sanju Samson, Axar Patel - then his career took a brutal turn no one expected

Yashbardhan Singh Chauhan has given Indian cricket another young name to circle. His hundred against Australia at Under-19 level carried the kind of authority that inevitably pushes the conversation beyond the match itself. Once a teenager begins dominating strong opposition, Indian cricket rarely confines itself to the present; attention quickly shifts towards how far he can go, how soon he can graduate and whether this might be the beginning of something much larger.

That instinct is understandable because Indian cricket has produced enough teenage talent to make optimism feel rational. Virat Kohli , Shubman Gill and Yashasvi Jaiswal all passed through some version of this scrutiny before establishing themselves at senior level. Yet age-group cricket has also produced another kind of story, one that serves as a reminder of just how treacherous the distance between promise and permanence can be.

There was once another Indian teenager for whom the projection looked even safer. He was an opener, a captain and, most strikingly, a player who seemed to grow whenever a trophy was at stake. In less than a year, he produced an unbeaten 112 against Australia in an Under-19 quadrangular final and then struck 121 against Pakistan in the Under-19 Asia Cup final.

The biggest performance arrived soon after. India were chasing 226 against Australia in the 2012 Under-19 World Cup final and had slipped to 97 for four, but their captain remained unmoved. He finished on 111 not out from 130 balls, struck six sixes and carried India home through an unbeaten 130-run stand for the fifth wicket.

Nor was this merely one brilliant junior tournament followed by immediate decline. A few months later, he made another hundred in another final, scoring 116 as Delhi won the Vijay Hazare Trophy. By then, the identity barely needed announcing. It was Unmukt Chand.

The familiar version of Chand’s career begins with that World Cup final and ends with the fact that he never played for India. What has gradually faded from memory is everything in between, because Chand did not simply disappear after junior cricket or fail to translate age-group success into any meaningful senior progress.

Three years after lifting the Under-19 World Cup, he was captaining India A. The side around him included Mayank Agarwal, Manish Pandey, Karun Nair, Kedar Jadhav, Sanju Samson and Axar Patel, several of whom would go on to play substantial international cricket. Chand, crucially, was not merely surviving on the reputation of 2012.

In the 2015 one-day triangular series involving India A, Australia A and South Africa A, he scored 235 runs in five matches at an average of 47 as India A won the tournament. Later that year, India A also defeated Bangladesh A under his captaincy, meaning that at 22 he was already leading the level immediately beneath the Indian senior side.

That is what makes the eventual trajectory so striking. Chand had captained India to a junior World Cup, scored hundreds in major finals, established himself in senior domestic cricket and then been entrusted with India A leadership.