JUSTIN LANGER: Are players born with talent or does it come from years of belief?

Talent is one of the most used words in sport, and yet it is one of the least understood.

We say a young player has “it.” We say someone was “born with it”. We treat talent as a fixed parcel, handed out at birth as a gift from the Gods.

Others argue that talent is not innate, but rather built.

After 35 years inside professional sport, what I have actually seen, is as interesting as any of the books I have read on the subjects attempting to define the word, talent.

Experience has shown me that one’s genes set the course, while experience, mindset, work ethic and focus help determine where that journey ends up.

Every so often though, sport produces a human being who makes you stop and reconsider everything you thought you knew.

They are rare.

While others support the more hopeful theory that hard work and sacrifice are the key.

Two examples stand in front of us today.

One is 15 years old and from a village in Bihar, India. The other is 38 and about to run out for his 433rd VFL/AFL game.

While you could argue they sit at opposite ends of the talent conversation, between them, they help tell the whole story.

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi is a boy who defies all the rules

This time last year I wrote about him while coaching in the IPL.

In his debut game against us, he walked out into the middle of the biggest domestic cricket tournament in the world and hit his first ball for six. He was 14.

Two games later, playing for the Rajasthan Royals, he became the youngest centurion in the history of men’s T20 cricket, smashing a hundred off 35 deliveries, the second-fastest century in IPL history and the fastest ever by an Indian.

Must be a fluke we all thought. Surely that will be the high point. A lightning strike. A story to tell the grandkids.

Instead, this year’s IPL has been an exhibition of something the game has never seen. This week he smashed my team the Lucknow Super Giants to every part of the cricket ground.

It was breathtaking, mesmerizing and, in our case, soul-destroying.

Vaibhav has struck 53 sixes this season, the second most by any batter in any T20 tournament in history, behind only Chris Gayle’s 59 in 2012. He has hit three innings of 10-plus sixes in the IPL, only Gayle has done it more often.

In one match against Sunrisers Hyderabad he hit five sixes off the first six balls he faced and rattled off another hundred. He has been the standout performer of the entire competition.

I say it again, he’s 15.

Everything we think we know about talent says this shouldn’t be possible. Strength, power, the cognitive load of facing 150km/h bowling in front of 50,000 people, the emotional regulation required to keep playing freely after every dismissal.

These things are supposed to come with years. Vaibhav makes them look like birthrights.

After our game on Monday, I did something I have only done twice in my life. I wandered over and asked him if we could have a “selfie” together. The only other time I found the courage to do that was for my childhood hero, South Fremantle football star Stephen Michael. That was a couple of years ago at Optus Stadium. I was unapologetically starstruck.

On Monday I couldn’t help myself, because after all these years in the game, I simply can’t believe how this kid plays. He is nothing like I have seen before.

The question is already being asked, where does he sit in the pantheon? The fairest comparison is to the other prodigies, the ones who arrived early and announced themselves before the world was ready.

Ricky Ponting made his first-class debut for Tasmania at 17. Rod Marsh watched him in the nets at the Cricket Academy and called him the best young batsman he had ever seen. Punter scored a Sheffield Shield century at 18 and was wearing the baggy green at 20.

Sachin Tendulkar is the closest historical parallel to what we’re watching now. He made his Test debut at 16 years 205 days. Facing Imran Khan, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis in Karachi, he got hit in the face and kept batting.

A nation hung its hopes on a teenager’s shoulders, and the teenager carried them for 24 years.

Sir Donald Bradman is, and always will be, the standard against which everything else is measured. A Test average of 99.94. No human being in any sport has stood that far above their peers. The eerie thing about The Don was that he taught himself in the backyard at Bowral, hitting a golf ball with a stump against a water tank. No coach. No academy. He did not develop. He appeared. Much like Sooryavanshi has.

But then there is Scott Pendlebury, who defines the other kind of greatness

On Saturday afternoon at the MCG, the 38-year-old midfielder will run out for the 433rd time in the famous black and white of Collingwood, breaking the all-time VFL/AFL games record.

Pendlebury has built something quite different from Sooryavanshi, but no less extraordinary.

His numbers are staggering. Two AFL premierships. A Norm Smith Medal. Six-time All Australian. Five Copeland Trophies. Captain of the club from 2014 to 2022. League record-holder for career disposals, handballs and tackles.

And on Saturday, he passes Brent Harvey’s 432 and becomes the most enduring footballer the game has produced.

The lovely twist in his story is that he was never meant to be a footballer. His first love was basketball. By 16 he had represented Australia. He won an Australian Institute of Sport scholarship as a guard.

When he chose football and walked away from the AIS, the squad spot he vacated went to a kid named Patty Mills, who would later win an NBA Championship with the San Antonio Spurs.

That dual-sport background matters. It is the unspoken DNA of his football, the spatial awareness, the change-of-pace deception, the soft hands, the famous ability to slow time when everyone around him is hurrying. In a way, it is the Australian way of building skill by playing different sports at a young age.

The honest answer to what is talent? lies between the boy from Bihar and the super man from Collingwood.

But there is a deeper point. Nobody in 2006 looked at the skinny kid from Sale and predicted his path.

He was pick five in his draft, a fine selection, but not seen as a generational one. What he had _ and what he has spent 21 seasons compounding _ is an extraordinary work ethic, an unshakeable temperament, a relentless professionalism, and an intelligence for the game that has only deepened with the years.

If Sooryavanshi is talent in its rawest, most God-given form, Pendlebury is talent as a verb, talent built, refined, maintained, and protected across more than two decades of weekly contact football.

In Pendlebury we see that longevity is part of the talent code.

This is the piece we forget. We often celebrate the arrival, and we often under-celebrate the staying. But longevity is talent.

Showing up at the highest level every week for 20 years requires a different kind of genius from striking sixes at 14.

Former Australian cricket coach John Buchanan would always say longevity is the sign of a true champion. LeBron has it. The Williams’ sisters as well. Tendulkar had it. Ponting had it. Pendlebury embodies it.

The honest answer to “what is talent?” lies between the boy from Bihar and the super man from Collingwood.

There is a layer that is given. Bradman’s eye. Tendulkar’s timing. Tiger’s swing at two. Sooryavanshi’s startling power and freedom at 15. These cannot be coached into existence.

But there is another layer that is built patiently, professionally, painfully over thousands of unseen mornings. Pendlebury’s stillness in traffic. His ability to play 433 games when most of his draft class were gone by 250. That is craft.

The best in any field accepts the gift, but refuse to coast on it.

They build the craft but never let process kill instinct. And they understand that being great once is not the same as being great for a long time.

This weekend, in two different sports on two different continents, both ends of that spectrum will be on display. A 15-year-old in India who looks like he was sent from another planet. A 38-year-old in Melbourne who has simply outlasted everyone.

Both are “talented,” and yet neither word means the same thing.