Abhishek Sharma takes T20 hitting out of this world

"He was a bit lucky as well, even though he played an exceptional knock which was out of this world, to be honest."

This was Shreyas Iyer, interviewed immediately after his team, Punjab Kings (PBKS), had suffered an extraordinary defeat at the hands of Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH), who had chased down 246 with nine balls to spare courtesy a 55-ball 141 from Abhishek Sharma.

If you hadn't watched the match, Iyer's words may have come across as a little churlish, a losing captain's immediate reaction to losing a match from a position of immense strength.

As a description of this innings, though, it was spot-on. Abhishek played an exceptional, out-of-this-world knock. He was also lucky. More than a bit.

We'll come to the luck, but first, a recap of Abhishek's form coming into this game. His last four innings had brought him scores of 6, 1, 2 and 18. Abhishek's top-order colleagues had also experienced lean runs over these four games, and SRH had lost all of them. At the start of IPL 2025, much of the talk surrounding SRH revolved around whether they could break the 300 barrier. Five games into the season, they had just one win and had lost more powerplay wickets (12) than anyone else. The approach of their top order, which had driven them to so many stratospheric totals, was now coming into question.

Even SRH's head coach seemed to be feeling the heat. He wasn't yet asking his batters to tone down their aggression, but he was asking them to "respect conditions", and "respect how well other teams are bowling".

As things turned out, those options weren't exactly open to SRH when they began their innings on Saturday. They had just been asked to pull off the second-biggest chase in IPL history.

This was the kind of chase that called for frantic boundary-hitting. It also called for a bit of luck.

And luck smiled on SRH from the start. Both their openers got off the mark with boundaries that went in unintended directions, Abhishek's via a slice to the deep-third boundary. And Abhishek hit his next ball in the air, over the fielder at short cover, where the leaping Marcus Stoinis only managed to get his fingertips to the ball.

Luck. It has four letters, but cricket discourse tends to treat it like a four-letter word, something to be spoken of in whispers, if spoken of at all. It has a significant influence on the fortunes (a revealing word in itself) of players and teams, but to talk about luck is to risk being accused of downplaying skill and effort.

Let's talk about luck, then, but let's talk about both kinds of luck. Go back to Abhishek's four previous innings before this one: 6, 1, 2, 18. A lot of things went into those scores: the bowlers and conditions he faced, the oppositions' plans and how they were executed, and so forth, and also luck. Over those four innings, he only played seven false shots, and they brought about three dismissals. That's outrageously bad luck by itself, before you factor in how his other dismissal came about: a mix-up when he was at the non-striker's end.

Abhishek was due a bit of luck when he began his innings against PBKS. And so were his top-order colleagues. Travis Head had been dismissed four times off 15 false shots, and the desperately unlucky Ishan Kishan four times off eight false shots.

It's unusual for every member of a top three to endure this sort of wretched luck at the same time. Perhaps SRH's issues coming into this game didn't stem from their approach, or not respecting conditions and their opponents' plans. Perhaps they had just been plain unlucky.

SRH were due a bit of luck, then, and they found it on Saturday. Abhishek was the biggest recipient, surviving seven false shots within the powerplay alone, including that chance to Stoinis and a catch at the backward-point boundary in the fourth over when Yash Thakur overstepped. The luck extended beyond the powerplay too, with mishits falling into no-man's land multiple times, and a high, swirling chance that Yuzvendra Chahal couldn't quite hold on to after aborting his follow-through and running towards the mid-on region.

Luck. It isn't the opposite of skill, but as a batter, you sometimes need one to be able to showcase the other.

Showcase was just what Abhishek did. Take the two balls either side of the Thakur no-ball, both hit for effortless sixes over the on side. Both balls were angled across Abhishek, one pitching on a good length and finishing around the top of off stump, and the other full enough to deny most batters elevation. He made light of the difficulty of working against the angle and slightly inconvenient lengths, putting both balls away with mere flicks of his wrist.

Both these shots came within the first ten balls Abhishek faced. He's made a habit of playing these types of shots early in his innings, and it perhaps takes a run of bad luck to truly appreciate how difficult it is to get off to starts like he does.

His opening partner Head is blessed with this rare ability too, but even he wasn't his usual self on Saturday; he went as far as leaving alone two of the first three balls he faced. It's possible that the low scores and defeats leading up to this game had some effect on how he started.

"Giving ourselves a chance," Head said, when asked what he had discussed with Abhishek before SRH began their chase. "I was probably a little bit more patient in the first couple of overs in this game. They've got a quality couple of new-ball bowlers, I knew the sort of plans they were going to come [with]. Yeah, probably a little bit more quiet, and Abhi got off to a flier. So just trying to support him as much as I can."

You've got to be some player to make Travis Head, of all people, take on a supporting role.

You've got to be some player to take a good-length ball from wide outside off stump and helicopter it 106m over midwicket. You've got to be some player to do this against a bowler as tall and bouncy as Marco Jansen. Abhishek played this shot because PBKS were trying to force him to hit to the longer square boundary on the off side, and he wasn't going to let their plans constrain him.

There were even two occasions - off Jansen and then Thakur - when he walked right across his stumps, exposed all three, and clipped yorker-length balls to the fine-leg boundary.

"If you've seen me close enough, I never play anything behind the wicket, but still I was trying a few shots," Abhishek said during his Player-of-the-Match interview. "They had a pretty good plan for us, outside off [stump], but I just wanted to invent a few shots, which I think was very easy on this pitch because of the bounce and the size of one side."

Yes, this was a beautiful pitch to bat on, and yes, Abhishek was hitting these shots to the smaller boundary. But no, they weren't "very easy". Not for most others.

For Abhishek on this unreal day, though, anything seemed possible. SRH, chasing 246, became favourites nine overs into their innings, according to ESPNcricinfo's Forecaster. Six balls later, their win probability had climbed to 79.38%.

By this stage, Abhishek had already reached 87. Three overs later, he went from 98 to 100 with an utterly uncharacteristic pair of clipped singles to long-on. Despite that hint of slowing down as he neared the landmark, he had brought it up in just 40 balls.

To get to a century at that rate demands sustained risk-taking, and pulling it off demands an extraordinary amount of skill - and, sometimes, a little bit of luck. This was Abhishek's third T20 hundred in 40 or fewer balls; no one else has done it as many times, and only three other batters have even done it twice.

For a batter to score big and quick and do it on multiple occasions requires an ability to hit boundaries from the get-go and sustain that momentum through an innings, against pace and spin, within the powerplay and outside it. Abhishek can do all of that. And he has the self-belief to keep backing his methods even when he's gone through streaks of low scores and rotten luck.

When everything comes together as it did on this surreal Saturday, Abhishek can make things look absurdly easy. Don't ever let that fool you.