Abhishek Sharma draws level with Virat Kohli on nine T20 hundreds for an Indian batter
Nine T20 hundreds for an Indian batter used to be a Virat Kohli number. It has been a Virat Kohli number for a decade. As of Tuesday night in Hyderabad, with Abhishek Sharma on 100 off 47 balls against Delhi Capitals, it is now a shared number. Eight of those nine Abhishek hundreds have come inside 50 deliveries, which is not a record either man set out to chase but one that tells you how the game has moved.
Abhishek finished on 135 not out off 68 balls, his highest IPL score and his second in the league. He is now level with Kohli on nine centuries in the T20 format across IPL and international T20 cricket. His fastest in that group was a 37-ball blitz against England at the Wankhede in February last year, India's second-fastest T20I hundred behind Rohit Sharma. Tuesday was the one that pulled him alongside the name that sits on top of almost every Indian batting list.
How the gap closed this quickly
Kohli scored his first IPL century in 2016. He had to wait years between several of them. The shape of his hundreds was the classic Kohli one, paced and anchored, set up through the middle overs and accelerated at the end. It is a method that held up because the format's death-over hitting was rarely worth the risk of a 15-ball thirty at the top.
Abhishek came into this conversation through a different door. Seven of his nine have come in the last fifteen months. He is the sort of opener for whom a 40-ball hundred is not the ceiling, it is the pace. Eight of his nine have come inside 50 balls, the fastest a 37-ball effort against England at the Wankhede in February last year, which remains the second-fastest T20I hundred by an India batter behind Rohit Sharma's 35-ball effort. He plays the same six-hitting shots Kohli always could, but the volume is different, and the willingness to take out a good ball in the first over is different. The format has changed around the batter and Abhishek is one of the players who has pulled it forward.
The IPL list is a different thing
It is worth being careful about what the nine covers. The Kohli-Abhishek comparison is for T20 centuries across all the lists that get counted together, which means IPL plus international T20. In IPL only, Kohli still sits well clear on the all-time list, with Abhishek on two IPL hundreds after Tuesday. Chris Gayle is another entry everyone remembers. This headline is specifically about what an Indian batter has done in the format as a whole.
Abhishek also became the fourth SRH batter to cross 2000 IPL runs for the franchise on Tuesday, joining David Warner, Shikhar Dhawan and Kane Williamson. He is the second Indian on that list, after Dhawan. He turns twenty-six in September, is eight innings into this IPL season, and has passed 300 runs in the competition. The run of numbers is starting to add up to more than a hot streak.
What the wider game does with him now
The interesting question for the selectors is not whether Abhishek is in the T20 World Cup squad. He is. It is whether his form is going to push the batting order into a shape it has not taken before, with him and Shubman Gill opening and the older names moved around them. Kohli's white-ball tempo is still a model in many ways, but the Indian top order has visibly shifted in the past eighteen months toward a more aggressive powerplay method. Abhishek is the clearest example of that shift in the IPL this season.
Records go. Nine becomes ten, and ten becomes twelve. The more revealing thing about Tuesday was the ease of it. A 47-ball hundred in a must-win game, carried on to 135, against a full-strength bowling attack, on a ground that is not a 240-target ground by default. Abhishek is not going to stop at Kohli's mark, and he probably will not stop at a tenth. The question that matters is what the ceiling looks like for a top-order player who has already made this the base rate.
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