Following his side’s win over the Mumbai Indians (MI), Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) opener Travis Head hailed Abhishek Sharma as “one of the best” spin hitters he has ever seen and expressed happiness at finally getting a big knock under his belt this season.

The ‘Travi-Shek’ opening pair once again produced fireworks, but instead of operating with brief cameos in the background, Travis finally returned to his most dangerous form against the five-time champions, scoring a brisk 30-ball 76, with four boundaries and eight sixes which killed the 244 run chase in the powerplay itself.

At 25, Abhishek Sharma is already in his eighth season at Sunrisers Hyderabad. Having been traded to the franchise after just one season with Delhi Capitals in 2018, the southpaw from Punjab has acquired an imposing aura in orange, garnering the unconditional affection of a quintessentially easy-going Hyderabadi crowd with his daring stroke-play.

On Tuesday night (April 21, 2026), Abhishek’s stature at Sunrisers rose further as his second IPL hundred helped the side hammer his former franchise by 47 runs at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium.

India’s T20 World Cup-winning stars Abhishek Sharma and Axar Patel were noticeable additions to the National Anti-Doping Agency’s (NADA) Registered Testing Pool, which was dominated by athletics, for the second quarter of the ongoing year.

Abhishek and Axar have replaced Smriti Mandhana and Shreyas Iyer in the latest list of 348 sportspersons in the RTP who will be required to share their whereabouts with the anti-doping agency and be available for testing in a specified window everyday.

Ishan Kishan has been appointed stand-in captain of Sunrisers Hyderabad ahead of IPL 2026, with opener Abhishek Sharma named his deputy.

The India wicketkeeper-batter will lead the side in the absence of regular skipper Pat Cummins, who is currently recovering from a back injury that also ruled him out of the recent T20 World Cup.

“Pat Cummins will miss a few games while recovering from injury. Until he returns, Ishan Kishan will serve as captain and Abhishek Sharma as vice-captain,” the franchise posted on X on Wednesday (March 18, 2026).

This marks a rare moment in IPL history, where every team features an Indian captain — at least until Cummins regains full fitness, the last time being in the early stages of the 2019 edition.

Cummins has led Sunrisers since 2024, leading them to the final in his debut season. The team, however, slipped to a sixth-place finish last year and missed out on the playoffs. Overall, in 30 matches as skipper, he has registered 15 wins, 14 losses, and one No Result.

Kishan, who was signed for ₹11.25 crore in 2025, made an immediate impact with an unbeaten 47-ball 106 on SRH debut against Rajasthan Royals. His form, however, tapered off as the season progressed, ending with 354 runs from 13 innings at a strike rate of 152.58.

The 27-year-old heads into IPL 2026 in excellent touch. He guided Jharkhand to the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, its maiden domestic title, finishing as the tournament’s leading run-scorer with 517 runs in 10 innings. That earned him a national team recall for its title-winning T20 World Cup campaign, where he amassed 317 runs, the second-most for India.

SRH will kick off its campaign this year against defending champion Royal Challengers Bengaluru at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru on March 28.

India’s bowling coach Morne Morkel stressed that there had been no discussion about Abhishek Sharma’s wretched run in the T20 World Cup so far.

Abhishek is yet to open his account in the tournament, and during Friday’s (February 20, 2026) training, the opener was seen spending considerable time with head coach Gautam Gambhir. The southpaw, who has been dismissed for a duck thrice, could face another big test when India takes on South Africa in its first Super Eight match at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad on Sunday (February 22, 2026).

When asked if there has been talk within the team about Abhishek’s poor form, Morkel denied emphatically.

“Absolutely, no discussion. He is a world-class player. So far in the tournament, luckily, there have been some guys standing up for Abhishek (others scoring runs),” Morkel said.

Morkel, however, agreed that Abhishek needs to score runs as the tournament enters its business end. “But we are going through a very important phase of the World Cup now and we expect him to do well. I am pretty sure, not only for the team but also for all the viewers watching the game.

“Because Abhishek is entertaining, and we love to see that.

“I am sure that he is hitting the ball well. It is just a matter of getting that start; he will get going after that,” Morkel said.

The pitches in Mumbai and Ahmedabad have raised eyebrows, but Morkel was sympathetic towards the curators, saying that they had provided strips to the best of their abilities.

“Credit to the curators for producing pitches that are 200-plus surfaces so late in the season. It is a nightmare. There is a lot of pressure on those guys. They put a lot of hard work into giving us the best surface that they can possibly prepare.”

The coach was unsure if the pitches are tiring because of overuse during the domestic season.

“So far this tournament, we have done really well with batting and bowling. Bar the one game, the first game, it was not a 200-plus surface.

“It was maybe a 170-run surface, and we went a little bit too hard at the start. But again, that was the learning. So there have been learnings from every match so far, and I think that it is the beauty about this game,” Morkel said.

India batting coach Sitanshu Kotak threw his weight behind swashbuckling opener Abhishek Sharma, who finds himself under the cosh after failing to open his account in his first two outings in the ongoing T20 World Cup.

While there are claims about Abhishek’s vulnerability on the off-side, Kotak said that getting into the minutiae with the 25-year-old would be counterproductive.

“We don’t overanalyse unnecessarily. Sometimes, you only start making more assumptions than the opposition. He has his plans sorted,” the former Saurashtra batter explained on the eve of the match against the Netherlands at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad.

That Pakistan head coach Mike Hesson had been planning for three days how to dismiss Abhishek was a feather in the Indian batter’s cap, according to Kotak.

“Credit to Abhishek that they are so concerned about him. They could have planned to get him out early, but I don’t think they could have planned that he would get out at mid-on,” he quipped.

Pakistan had prepared for the threat of Abhishek, but Ishan Kishan came out of the syllabus to hammer Salman Agha’s men into submission.

Kishan, returning to the National set-up after more than two years in the wilderness, has undergone a stunning career rejuvenation following a tough period when he lost his BCCI central contract.

“He is not someone who cares too much about things, which the T20 game requires. He is very talented because he can play all around the ground, so he is very difficult to restrict if you don’t get him out,” Kotak said.

The coach also defended Tilak Varma’s 24-ball 25 vigil, during which the southpaw looked tentative against the Pakistan spinners.

“Tilak played exactly the way the team wanted. Considering the wicket, we were more focused on building partnerships and getting to the par score, around 160”.

Flamboyant Indian opener Abhishek Sharma has been hospitalised with a stomach infection, leaving him doubtful for the T20 World Cup match against Namibia in New Delhi on Thursday (February 12, 2026).

Sharma has been hospitalised in New Delhi for the past two days.

“Abhishek has been admitted to a private hospital in Delhi due to stomach infection. Some tests are being done to ascertain the problem. It is still not clear whether he will be discharged today. But match against Namibia looks doubtful as of now,” a BCCI source said.

The Indian team management is hopeful of having him on the park for the big game against Pakistan in Colombo on February 15.

It has been learnt that the 25-year-old attended the dinner at head coach Gautam Gambhir’s place on Sunday but left much earlier than the rest of his teammates.

Ishan Kishan’s stunning comeback tale turned even more stunning on Saturday night.

From two years of wilderness to the World Cup squad, it has been a remarkable journey for the man from Jharkhand. Now, the team management may find it difficult to keep him out of the XI in the T20I World Cup starting on February 7.

Kishan did no harm to his prospects in India’s last match before the big event. He scored a sensational maiden T20I hundred in the fifth match of the series against New Zealand as the Men in Blue posted 271 for five and scripted a 46-run win at the Greenfield Stadium.

Kishan (103, 43b, 6×4, 10×6) was brilliant in front of a near-capacity crowd, which may have come more to watch another Indian wicketkeeper-batter. But, local lad Sanju Samson failed yet again.

Samson had to trudge back to the dressing room in the third over; his thick outside edge off Lockie Ferguson found Bevon Jacobs at deep backward point. So, a disappointing series came to a dismal end for the opener who was, interestingly, playing his first ever international match at home, after debuting for India way back in 2015.

Sanju’s partner Abhishek Sharma (30, 16b, 4×4, 2×6), who lofted a glorious drive over the extra cover fence against Jacob Duffy in the first over, was shaping up nicely when he was cleaned up by Ferguson, the quick who was playing hist first game for New Zealand in well over a year.

But, Suryakumar Yadav joined Kishan and initially chose to watch the exceptional hitting from the latter at the other end. The skipper then changed gears at the right time to score his third fifty (63, 30b, 4×4, 6×6), of the series, and his third-wicket partnership with Kishan yielded 137 off just 57 balls.

Kishan completed his hundred off 42 balls, slog-sweeping Mitchell Santner over deep-midwicket. It was an astonishing display of strokemaking, playing all around the wicket.

After the break, Kishan traded his batting gloves with the keeping ones (a sign ahead of the World Cup maybe?). The Kiwis needed something special at the top of order, and the hard-hitting Finn Allen, who joined the squad only a couple of days ago, provided that with a blistering 80 (38b, 8×4, 6×6) and he added 100 for the second wicket with Rachin Ravindra.

He became the first of Axar Patel’s three victims. Arshdeep Singh took five. And India had just the perfect night.

In sport, coaches usually adapt a system to the strengths of the players available rather than the other way around. Players come with different skill sets: the left-arm spinner who is also a terrific fielder, the frontline batter who can bowl a few holding overs and maybe even pick up a wicket or two and so on. It is the coach’s job to understand his players well and use them where they are most likely to mesh their skills to win matches.

All that might seem obvious. But some coaches like to disrupt the pattern. Greg Chappell was fond of moving players around in white ball cricket changing the batting order, for instance, so everybody is prepared for any match situation. India’s current coach Gautam Gambhir does that sometimes too.

Experimentation

Yet, at the end of the year, India, who lost more Tests than they won are yet to find a settled No. 3 in any format. The suspicion remains that Gambhir is trying to squeeze his players into a pre-determined system and not finding one that suits his players. Experimentation — a word being constantly thrown at Gambhir’s face in criticism — isn’t such a bad thing. With the World T20 just a few weeks and a few matches away, it is inevitable. But a coach needs to keep an open mind and ensure he has enough data for selectors to choose the right combination.

Sanju Samson, the smoothest (for want of a better term) batter in the national team since Rohit Sharma finds himself in the wilderness now. Has the coach got enough data to either drop him from the squad or use him as batter or wicketkeeper? There is very little you can learn of a player’s form when he spends all his time in the dugout. He deserves to be told if he has a future; so does Indian cricket.

White ball cricket, especially T20, is a natural platform for experimentation given that Test players need more time to mature. Here you can hit the right note early through a combination of luck and skill.

Currently there are two kinds of T20 players. The first began as First Class cricketers and then adapted to the demands of T20. Most bowlers in the Indian team belong to this category. An interesting case is that of Varun Chakaravarthy who is 34 and came through the TNPL and IPL having lost some years to academics. He is now the No. 1 T20 bowler in the world.

The most successful batter of this group is skipper Suryakumar Yadav who invented shots, played them with confidence and was for long the No. 1 batter in the format.

Attacking game

The second group is the T20 generation. Abhishek Sharma, who began his IPL career as a 17-year-old, and has a strike rate of nearly 190 in T20 Internationals is the natural here. This is the generation of varying ages but identical attitudes to playing attacking cricket, unafraid to go for their shots from the first delivery and most comfortable in the shortest format. Failure is not a stumbling lock. Tilak Verma, Rinku Singh, Vaibhav Suryavanshi, Ayush Mhatre all profess a philosophy distinctly different from the previous generation. They may or may not save a Test match, but they will strike their way to many T20 victories.

In cricket, there is a mythical delivery called the ‘unplayable’ ball. Those named above are batters capable of the unplayable shot, one that didn’t seem possible till they played it. Suryavanshi is not yet 15 and is currently setting the world alight at the Under-19 Asia Cup (50 overs). This is an excellent supply line to the senior team. At least a couple of players from this squad, all born in this century, deserve to be promoted to the senior team, and promoted early.

Now that players have become more specialised, with few overlaps between the Test team and T20, it may also be time to split the coaching. Thus, Gambhir for white ball matches, and someone like V.V.S. Laxman for Test cricket.

India do not play a Test till August next year. For a while the conversation will be about T20, with the World Cup in February next.