Some fathers see talent early. Raj Kumar Sharma saw something else. He saw a four-year-old boy in Amritsar hitting a cricket ball like it owed him money. Most fathers would have smiled and gone back to their tea. Raj Kumar set an alarm for 4 AM. Every day. No exceptions.
The boy was Abhishek. The city was Amritsar. The time was impossibly early. While other kids slept, this one ran. Lifted weights. Swam.
Then faced bowlers who could make the ball disappear before you blinked. Local coaches worried. Other fathers warned about burned-out shoulders and broken dreams. Abhishek just asked them to bowl quicker.
That is the whole story, really. Everything else is just detail.
The Numbers That Sound Made Up
Since 2023, Abhishek Sharma has made more than 4,000 T20 runs. His strike rate is 196. Not for a week. Not for a tournament. Over four thousand runs. At a speed that would get most batters dropped if they tried it for five overs.
Eight T20 hundreds in this period. No one else in world cricket has more. His career total is now 9. Virat Kohli has the same number. Sharma is 25. Kohli has played more than double the matches.
Here is the part that makes you put down your phone and stare at the wall. In his entire T20 career, across every level, Sharma has faced more than 56 balls in just one innings.
Four of his nine hundreds have crossed 135. He does this in about 50 balls. Then he walks off, leaving the rest of the innings for everyone else.
It is not batting. It is a heist with a stopwatch.
The Alarm and the Boy Who Was Never Scared
Raj Kumar Sharma did not believe in gifts. He believed in repetition. The 4 AM wake-up was not cruelty. It was construction. While Amritsar slept, his son was already sweating.
There is a story from Under-16 days that tells you the wiring. A fast bowler hit him. Or came close enough. The kind of ball that sends teenagers home to their mothers. Abhishek walked over and asked for more speed. That is not courage. That is something deeper. A factory setting that was always there.
The Vijay Merchant Trophy in 2015-16 was the first explosion. 1,200 runs. 57 wickets. Top scorer and top wicket-taker. India Under-19 selectors had no choice. By late 2016, he was captaining India to the Youth Asia Cup title.
Two years later, he was in the squad that won the Under-19 World Cup under Prithvi Shaw. His fifty against Bangladesh in the quarter-final showed he could think when the pressure turned up.
But real pressure was waiting. It always is.
The Lockdown That Built a Batter
March 2020. The world stopped. Cricket stopped. For most players, this was stolen time. For Abhishek Sharma, it was the beginning of everything.
Yuvraj Singh opened his house in Chandigarh. Shubman Gill came too. What happened over those months was not coaching. It was closer to passing down a family secret.
Yuvraj had spent his career fighting battles no one saw. Insecurities. Lack of guidance. A system that trusted him too late. He was determined the next generation would not walk the same empty road.
The method was hard love. Yuvraj would shout about technical mistakes. About bad shot choices. About anything less than the best. But the message never changed. Be fearless. Always. No matter the bowler. No matter the score. No matter what anyone says.
Yuvraj made a four-year plan. The goal was not IPL fame. It was the India cap. The real thing. Exactly four years and three months later, Sharma made his T20I debut. Yuvraj had called the timeline. He usually does.
Golf and the Beautiful Logic of Power
This is where it gets strange. To fix Sharma’s bat swing, Yuvraj and Brian Lara suggested golf. Yes. Golf. The game where people in strange trousers hit small balls into holes.
The logic is actually perfect. A golf swing lives and dies on core rotation, arm extension, clean follow-through. The same things that make cricket balls fly. Sharma took to it. His bat swing became shorter, cleaner, more violent. He started clearing boundaries with a body that looks too thin for the damage he causes.
The Partnership That Broke Math
Travis Head and Abhishek Sharma have opened together 32 times for Sunrisers Hyderabad. That is not many. Ten other opening pairs in IPL history have more innings. But only three have scored more runs.
Their run rate is 12.37. No other opening pair in IPL history with 1,000 runs together has crossed 10. Think about that. For every over they bat, SRH gets nearly 12.5 runs. Their partnership average is 48.5. They are basically promising 50 runs in the first four overs. Every single game.
In 2024 and 2025, SRH posted the two highest powerplay scores in IPL history. 125 for no loss. 107 for no loss. Both times, Head and Sharma did the damage. Fielding restrictions did not matter. The new ball did not matter. Bowlers’ plans did not matter.
Opposing captains started using their best bowlers in the third over. Sometimes the second. Because by the fourth, the match was already running away. That is not a partnership. That is a stick-up with two pieces of willow.
The Night He Matched Kohli
April 21, 2026. Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium. Delhi Capitals.
Sharma walked out to open. The first four overs, he did not hit one six. This was control. This was him telling himself, today your wicket has a price. He reached fifty in 25 balls. That was his slowest fifty ever in Hyderabad. Think about that sentence.
Then the explosion came. He reached his hundred in 47 balls. Finished not out on 135 off 68. Ten fours. Ten sixes. Only the second player after Chris Gayle to hit 10 sixes in an IPL innings more than once.
The century equalled Virat Kohli’s record for most T20 hundreds by an Indian. Nine. Sharma is 25. Kohli got there after years of grinding. Sharma got there by refusing to grind at all.
SRH made 242 for 2. Won by 47 runs. Another day at work.
Shera and the Man Who Finally Got His Due
Abhishek Sharma’s family calls him Shera. Lion. It fits. The aggression is not an act. It is just who he is.
But the real soul of this story is Yuvraj Singh. A man who retired feeling he never got the respect or backing he deserved. Who watched the system fail him in ways big and small. Who decided his second life would be about making sure no one else felt that loneliness.
Yuvraj has said that mentoring Sharma and Shubman taught him how to coach. Made him understand what a twenty-year-old cricketer actually needs in 2020, not what the system thought they needed in 2000.
For Yuvraj, Sharma’s success is proof. Evidence that the right guidance, given at the right time, with the right mix of love and discipline, can change everything.
There is a quiet symmetry here. Yuvraj, who fought alone, now watches a boy he raised fight with him in spirit. Every six Sharma hits carries Yuvraj’s fingerprints. Every record is shared. Every win is a soft answer to every doubt Yuvraj ever faced.
What Comes Next
Sunrisers Hyderabad used to be a team of waiting. Kane Williamson holding things together. Bowlers defending small totals. Under Pat Cummins and Daniel Vettori, with Sharma and Head at the top, they have become something else. A team that chases 300 not because it is possible but because it feels inevitable.
Sharma’s influence is already spreading. Priyansh Arya, another young aggressive opener, is also under Yuvraj’s wing.
The model is being copied. The blueprint is being shared. Indian T20 cricket is changing because one boy from Amritsar decided that staying alive was not enough. That the first ball was as good a time as any to attack.
He is 25 years old. He has 9 T20 centuries. The highest rating points ever. A strike rate of 196 over 4,000 runs. A partnership that breaks arithmetic. And a mentor who finally, through him, got the respect he always deserved.
The alarm still rings early in the Sharma house in Amritsar. Raj Kumar Sharma still wakes before dawn. Some habits do not die. They just produce things the world has never seen before.