By Prakash Nair 
Hyderabad, April 21: SRH scores 242/2. Just let that sit for a moment. Delhi Capitals came here tonight with a proper bowling attack. Lungi Ngidi, Kuldeep Yadav, Axar Patel, Natarajan, Mukesh Kumar. That is not a bad set of bowlers by any stretch. And Abhishek Sharma just made them look like they were bowling in a park on a Sunday afternoon.
135 not out. Off 68 balls. Still standing at the crease when it was all over.
Heinrich Klaasen, because apparently one man destroying you wasn’t enough, came in at the end and hit 37 off 13 balls. Travis Head made 37 before getting out. Ishan Kishan scored 25 before one of the stranger run-outs you’ll see this season ended his night.
Final score: 242 for 2.
Two wickets. Twenty overs. Pure, relentless, almost rude batting.
The First Few Overs Were Quiet. Then They Weren’t.
Nobody quite expected the start to be calm. SRH, especially this version of SRH with Abhishek and Head opening, usually come out swinging from ball one. Tonight they were measured. Almost careful. They ended the powerplay at 67 for 0, which honestly felt a little underwhelming given what this pair is capable of.
But there was a reason for it. The pitch was doing a little something early. Ngidi was swinging it. The openers read the situation, took what was on offer, and waited.
Then Nitish Rana came on to bowl.
Now Rana is a fine batter. As a bowler in an IPL match under lights in Hyderabad, he was always going to be vulnerable. Abhishek worked that out in about three seconds. First ball he can attack, he hits it for six over cover. Next one, another six, this time over long-on. Rana’s over went for 20 runs. The crowd was up. The match had changed completely, and we were still in the first six overs.
From that point, Abhishek basically decided the bowling attack was his to do whatever he wanted with. And that is more or less what happened for the next hour and a bit.
Travis Head and the Opening Stand
Head was the quieter one tonight, and that is absolutely fine because quiet for Travis Head still means 37 off 26 balls with a couple of sixes thrown in. He was busy, he was positive, and he gave Abhishek exactly the kind of partnership support the innings needed early on.
They put on 97 together before Axar broke it. It was a decent delivery, actually. Quick, flat, sliding across outside off, and Head went for the pull. Didn’t quite get the elevation. Sameer Rizvi at deep midwicket took it cleanly.
97 for 1. Ishan Kishan walked in.
Kuldeep Was Supposed to Stop This
Everyone knew before the match that Kuldeep Yadav was Delhi’s best option to slow things down in the middle overs. Left-arm wrist spin, the googly, the ability to deceive even the best batters. He’s been good this season. He was going to come on around overs eight to fourteen and make life difficult.
Instead, he got hit for 22 in his first over. Two sixes. Two fours. Abhishek and Ishan Kishan just took him apart as if they’d planned it. Kishan pulled one over square leg, Abhishek hit the next one straight back over his head, and suddenly the over was done, and SRH were somewhere north of 120.
Kishan’s night ended most annoyingly. He hit the ball back toward the bowler, it deflected off Nitish Rana’s hands, cannoned into the stumps, and Kishan was already halfway down the pitch and couldn’t get back. Run out for 25. Unlucky. One of those cricket things that happens and you can’t really do anything about it.
But here’s the thing that hurt Delhi more than the Kishan run-out. A few overs later, Natarajan bowled outside off, and Abhishek tried to go over the covers. Got it off the toe. Nitish Rana charged in from the deep, got both hands under the ball, and then dropped it.
Abhishek was 87 at the time.
He hit the next ball for four. Of course he did.
The Hundred That Made the Ground Go Silent Then Very Loud
When you’re approaching a T20 century, and the bowler tosses up a long hop, you don’t think about it. You just hit it. Abhishek hit it. Over deep midwicket, into the stands, gone before anyone could blink.
47 balls. Second IPL century of his career.
He turned around, both hands raised, and looked somewhere up into the night sky. His family was watching from the stands. The Hyderabad crowd, which had been getting louder all night, absolutely erupted. There is something about a home player making a hundred at home that a stadium feels different from anything else.
Now here’s the part that deserves a separate conversation. With this hundred tonight, Abhishek Sharma’s T20 centuries across all formats reached nine. That equals Virat Kohli. The Indian batter with the most T20 hundreds in the history of the format. Abhishek, at 24 years old, has matched that number tonight in Hyderabad against the Delhi Capitals in a league game.
And when he crossed 59 runs during this innings, he also quietly became only the fourth batter in SRH’s entire history to score 2,000 IPL runs for the franchise. The other three are David Warner, Shikhar Dhawan, and Kane Williamson. Names that belong on plaques in the stadium. And now Abhishek Sharma sits alongside them.
He is 24 years old. Worth saying again.
And Then Klaasen Came In
By this point, you’d think enough had happened. Abhishek had his hundred. The total was already somewhere around 190. SRH needed to keep wickets and push to 220 or so and call it a very good day.
Klaasen had other ideas.
37 runs. 13 balls. He walked in, looked at the situation, and decided he was going to take Lungi Ngidi apart first. Two sixes in the 18th over off consecutive deliveries. Not miscued, not edges over the keeper, proper hits, properly connected, landing deep in the stands. Ngidi, who has been one of the better fast bowlers in this IPL all season, just stood there and watched them go.
Natarajan came on for the 19th over and bowled genuinely brilliantly. Six balls, six yorkers, six runs conceded. It was the one over tonight where a DC bowler looked like a DC bowler is supposed to look.
Then Mukesh Kumar bowled the last over. Went for 20. That was that.
243. That Is What Delhi needs.
Not 193. Not 213. Two hundred and forty-three runs off twenty overs.
That means Pathum Nissanka and KL Rahul have to come out and score at twelve runs an over from the very first ball. That means every batter who comes in has to go immediately. That means David Miller, who pulled off a miracle in Bengaluru last Friday, has to somehow do something even bigger than that tonight.
It’s not impossible. Cricket has a habit of making you look stupid for saying something is impossible. But it is extremely, extremely difficult. The record chase at this ground this season is somewhere around 195.
SRH’s bowling has won them three games in a row. Malinga, Hinge, and Sakib Hussain all get to come out now and bowl with a 242 on the board behind them. That is a very different feeling from bowling, trying to defend 185.
The second innings starts now. Go on then, Delhi. Let’s see it.
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- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
