‘You can’t be No. 1 T20 batter without being mature’: Varun Aaron lauds Abhishek Sharma
HYDERABAD: Sunrisers Hyderabad are on a roll, winning three matches on the bounce to move up to third in the table. Abhishek Sharma’s calculated attack at the top came in handy. The left-hander, who struggled in the T20 World Cup, scoring 141 runs including two fifties, also had a tough start in this edition of the IPL, with scores of 7, 48, 0, 74 and 0 in the first five matches.
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He also failed to trouble the scorers in the first two home matches, coming down hard on the bowlers. Attacking from the start produced mixed results. However, in the last two innings, Abhishek showed a different side to his batting. He first chose to assess the conditions before going berserk. He scored a run off the first three balls against CSK’s Matthew Short and reached his fastest half-century (15b) in the previous match. And on Tuesday, he faced Mukesh Kumar and Nitish Rana in the first two overs. His first boundary came off the fifth ball.
SRH’s Pace Bowling coach Varun Aaron attributed it to the 25-year-old’s growing maturity.
“He’s always had that maturity and it’s been there over the last couple of years. You can’t be the world’s No. 1 T20 batsman without being mature. Obviously, he’s someone who sees the opposition, sees the surface and decides to play a certain way. Today, it wasn’t a surface where you could break the bank for leather on every ball. So, you have to respect the opponent, respect the surface and that’s exactly what he did. He has showed glimpses of that in the past,” Aaron said, adding, “When you play a high-risk, high-reward game, sometimes it doesn’t work and you have to give that leeway to a player like Abhishek.
