Abhishek Sharma’s secret of success: He wakes up at 4 am, meditates till sunrise, swims for an hour, plays golf and hits sixes for fun | Cricket News
TimesofIndia.com in Dubai: A couple of days ago, Abhishek Sharma posted a reel on Instagram with the caption “safal kyunki sabr bahut ae” (I am getting success because I have a lot of patience). As the adage goes, “Rome was not built in a day.” The story of Abhishek Sharma has been similar. He was not a breakout star like his fellow teammates Shubman Gill and Prithvi Shaw. He was drafted into the Punjab senior team right after the U-19 World Cup, but he was not elegant enough, not someone you loved to watch in the nets. The senior Punjab bowlers back then used to tease him that they could get him out with the new ball in three deliveries. They often did and bullied him as well, but in Yuvraj Singh, Abhishek found a mentor. These days, old videos of Yuvraj training Abhishek and Shubman during Covid are doing the rounds. Before the start of the tournament, Rajkumar Sharma, father of Abhishek, revealed to TimesofIndia.com the routine the former India all-rounder had given his son: “There was a timetable. When I first had a look at it, I asked him, will you be able to follow this? He hesitantly said, ‘Paji ne diya hai, karna toh hoga’ (Yuvraj Singh has given it to me, I will have to follow this).” In the timetable, there were clear instructions: he must get up at 4 am, meditate for half an hour, swim for 45 minutes in cold water, go to the gym, and only then head to the ground. “He used to go to the ground at 7 am, but his day started at 4. By the time he was facing bowlers, his concentration level was so high that he started picking lengths cleanly,” Abhishek Sharma’s father told TimesofIndia.com when he visited Team India’s practice session at the ICC Cricket Academy ahead of their Super Four clash against Pakistan. Abhishek burst onto the scene as a destroyer in IPL 2024, where he scored 484 runs in 16 matches at a strike rate of 204.22. He became the first batsman to pile up more than 400 runs without even facing 30 balls in a single innings. But it was his bat swing that caught everyone’s attention. Earlier, even in T20Is, hitting on the up was considered the domain of classical greats — remember Virat Kohli’s six off Haris Rauf at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in the 2022 T20 World Cup — an art admired as a notch above mere power-hitting. Abhishek started dismantling that notion with ease. His method is so simple that, in hindsight, the results from his handful of games hardly seem surprising. Yuvraj Singh wanted Abhishek to play golf. The Amritsar-born was hesitant to try it at first. There was a fear of failure — what if he was not good at it? It took Brian Lara to convince him that it would help him hit more sixes. “The six-hitting part he liked, so he started playing the sport,” said Rajkumar Sharma. In golf, Yuvraj worked on his stance, and with months of practice Abhishek perfected it, enhancing his bat swing. “Lara had told him that playing golf would help him concentrate better and would also be helpful in picking lengths,” said Sharma senior. Abhishek opens with Travis Head for Sunrisers Hyderabad, under captain Pat Cummins. This is where the Australian mindset of “fear none, let them fear you” was instilled in him. “Pat Cummins told him, ‘I want every bowler in this tournament to fear you. Don’t be afraid of getting out. Don’t target the boundary ropes, target the stands.’ The confidence shown by Cummins erased the fear of failure in him,” said his father. The Asia Cup has proved to be a coming-of-age tournament for Abhishek Sharma. Opponents fear him; his explosive batting has become the talk of the tournament. He is the leading run-getter with 309 runs. The second-best is Pathum Nissanka with 261 runs. The next-best Indian batter is Tilak Varma with 144 runs. He is the only batsman with a strike rate over 200 (204.64). He has become an enforcer and a nightmare for bowlers. But the secret of his success is “sabr” (patience), though with the willow, he is a destructor — ask any bowler in this tournament. And as his mentor Yuvraj said in a video to him: “Tu na sudhri bas, chakke maari jaaye, thalle na kheli” (You are not going to listen… you only keep hitting sixes, try hitting along the ground too).
