Abhishek SharmaThe 30-ball ton was, oddly, the least surprising part of what Abhishek Sharma did at the Arun Jaitley Stadium. It isn't even his fastest hundred.
What's odd about the innings is what it says about the number sitting next to that extraordinary strike rate: his average. Somewhere in Abhishek Sharma's memory, though, there's a faster century still.
It came two years ago, for Punjab against Meghalaya in a Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy fixture nobody outside domestic cricket was watching: 28 balls, no fanfare. So when he reached three figures in 30 deliveries against Afghanistan in New Delhi, becoming the fastest T20I centurion ever produced by a Full Member nation and only the third-fastest in the format's history overall, it wasn't a discovery.
It was a confirmation, delivered on a bigger stage, of something the data had already been saying for a while. Abhishek Sharma scores in the India vs Afghanistan T2OI seriesThe ground has some history with him already.
Eight years earlier, on the same square when it was still called Feroz Shah Kotla, a 17-year-old Sharma walked out at number six for Delhi Daredevils against Royal Challengers Bangalore and top-scored on IPL debut — an unbeaten 46 off 19 balls. It was the innings that first put his name into circulation.
None of that is really the story, though. The story is what his average has been doing while all this has been going on.
55. 55 per 100 balls.
Abhishek Sharma fast and consistent not fast or consistentPut that alongside the numbers of his closest opening peers and the combination starts to look strange. 89: a fraction higher on average, nearly thirty runs per hundred balls slower.
69. 50 for Head.
The gap isn't really about six-hitting or bravado. It's that T20 cricket generally punishes extreme aggression with a lower average, and in Abhishek's case, over more than fifty innings now, it hasn't.
Where the runs actually come fromLook closer and the shape of his batting explains some of it. 9%) have come in boundaries.
44%, the highest boundary share recorded in any men's T20I century. 20).
Zoom out to his whole T20 career, across formats, and he reached his hundredth six faster, by balls faced, than anyone the format has seen, edging West Indies' Evin Lewis. Among Indian batters with 50 or more T20 sixes, nobody has matched his rate of clearing the boundary.
