‘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 surge to No.3 in the table. Abhishek Sharma’s calculated attack at the top has come in handy. The southpaw, who struggled during the T20 World Cup, scoring 141 runs with two fifties, had a tough start in this edition of IPL too, 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, going hard at the bowlers. Attacking from the get-go has produced mixed results. However, in the last two innings, Abhishek showed a different aspect of his batting. He first chose to assess the conditions before going berserk. He scored one run off the first three balls against Matthew Short of CSK and raced to his fastest half-century (15b) in the previous match. And on Tuesday, he played out Mukesh Kumar and Nitish Rana in the first two overs. His first boundary came off the fifth ball.

SRH pace bowling coach Varun Aaron attributed it to the growing maturity of the 25-year-old.

“He’s always had that maturity and that’s been there over the last couple of years. You can’t be the No. 1 T20 batsman in the world without being mature. Obviously, he’s somebody who sees the opposition, sees the surface and decides to play a certain way. Today, it wasn’t the surface where you could just go hell for leather every single ball. So, you have to respect the opponent, respect the surface and he did exactly that. He’s shown glimpses of this in the past,” Aaron said, adding, “When you play a high risk, high reward kind of a game, sometimes it doesn’t work out. And you have to give a player like Abhishek that leeway.”