Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) batter Abhishek Sharma rose the highest as his team secured a ground-breaking victory against Punjab Kings (PBKS) in the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2025 match on Saturday. Abhishek was utterly dominant with the bat in the match, scoring 141 runs off just 55 balls, to take the team home with 2 overs to spare. After the game, Abhishek revealed that he was battling fever over the last four days but continued to receive words of encouragement from former India cricketer Yuvraj Singh and current Mumbai Indians vice-captain Suryakumar Yadav.
Abhishek had failed to fire runs in any of the 5 matches for SRH until the game against PBKS, breathing a huge sigh of relief. Yuvraj has been a mentor for Abhishek for a long time while Suryakumar is also a good friend. Keeping rivalry aside, Surya encouraged the SRH batter to move ahead of poor form and try to give his best on the field.
“To be honest, I was sick for four days-I had a fever. But I feel really grateful to have people like Yuvraj Singh and Suryakumar Yadav around me. They kept calling, kept checking in, and they believed in me,” Abhishek said in the post-match press conference.
“Even when I started to doubt myself a little, they didn’t. That belief from people like them-it matters a lot. When someone like that believes in you, you start believing in yourself again. For me, it was just about that one innings. I was waiting for it. And today it came,” Abhishek added.
Before the start of the Punjab Kings game, Abhishek had only scored 51 runs at an average of 10.50. He admitted in the media conference that there was pressure on him to deliver.
“Of course – if I say there wasn’t, I’d be lying. When you don’t perform well for three or four innings, and the team loses, the pressure does build up on individual players. But like I said during the post-match ceremony, I never felt any negativity in the team. No one had the mindset of ‘we’re losing.’ Everyone stayed positive,” Abhishek said.
“We all knew something big was coming from the team-and luckily, we got to break that four-match losing streak today,” the southpaw explained.
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