Raipur: By now you must be used to watching Abhishek Sharma go through his pre-batting ritual of flicking the ball between his hands with his eyes peeled to it.
The ‘see-ball, hit-ball’ theory possibly can’t be distilled into that astonishing strike rate of 190 without this ritual.
More confounding, though, is how he achieves that momentum with very few unorthodox shots. In a world where batting has grown to be infuriatingly complex, Abhishek debunks the myth that one needs to be improvising shots to stay ahead of the bowlers. And he has been at it for nearly two years now.
On the heels of a stupendous 35-ball 84 against New Zealand in the first T20I at Nagpur, Sharma wasn’t kidding anyone with the simplicity of his approach to batting.
“If you watch videos (of bowlers) or if you watch your batting videos as well, you get an idea where the bowler is planning to bowl to you or maybe where I’m going to play my shots,” he said at the presentation. “But it’s always about me backing my shots because I don’t have a lot of shots. It’s just a few shots. I’m going to practice a lot and just execute it.”
Between the drive, the slog and the pull, Sharma commands a consolidated strike rate of 236 and 888 out of the 1199 runs he has scored in T20Is, which works out to almost two-thirds of his career runs. Let that sink in.
He refrains from the upper cut, barely attempts the slog sweep, and doesn’t even hook too much – which for a tall batter like Sharma is quite a commitment to keeping batting simple. The impeccable timing helps. Like in the first over when Sharma hadn’t moved his feet too well to an inswinging delivery from Jacob Duffy but still hit it through the line to clear the fence.
Unlike most batters-and this is where he really stands out-Sharma lets the ball come to him. So when Kylie Jamieson bowled a slower ball to mess with Sharma’s timing, he delayed his bat swing just enough to get the sweet spot behind it anyway. Nothing random, nothing premeditated, Abhishek just takes it one ball at a time.
“If you see, I would never do range-hitting because I’m not that strong kind of guy,” he said. “I feel I’m more of a timing batter. So, for me, I have to just watch the ball and get used to the conditions because we are playing all over India right now and so I have to adapt to the conditions very quickly. And for that, I plan a day before or probably whenever I get a net session.”
Abhishek’s mindset is a lucid illustration of India’s high-risk approach to the game right now, without necessarily walking into a trap of a pre-decided score. Non-negotiable however is to start with a bang and set up the innings. Abhishek has been doing that with minimum fuss and without complicating his game.
“I don’t feel it’s a high-risk (game),” he said. “But for me, I feel this is my, I wouldn’t say it’s my comfort zone, but it’s like I’ve always want team to be first because they want to use the first six overs and that’s what I’ve been practicing before the nets as well. And that was always in my mind if I do because if you see all the bowlers, all the main bowlers and you know, from all the teams, they bowl first, second, three overs probably. And if I get scores in the first three, four overs, then, you know, we have always got the upper hand.”
Despite the fluid, counterpunching nature of T20, India have been exercising a sense of control almost whenever Abhishek opens the batting.
A reason behind it could be the fact that so simple is his game that gigabytes of video and data analysis has so far failed to pinpoint Abhishek’s Achilles heel. He isn’t exactly elegant, which is okay because the brevity of the format can’t afford it anyway. But to be effective he puts in the kind of training that makes six hitting a mundane routine.
“If you see all these teams, they always have a plan for me,” he said. “So far, I think it’s just not the fielding, it’s all about the pitching and the bowling as well. So it’s about the preparation I’ve been doing before the games, because I’ve got two, three days or maybe a week before this. So I knew in my mind that I’m gonna get challenged by these bowlers and I have this mind. But obviously, I’m gonna back my instinct and I’ve been practicing a lot about that.”