Does Abhishek Sharma need the powerplay to find his tempo?

Chasing West Indies' 247 for 3 at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium on Wednesday, Abhishek Sharma stayed for 24 balls and made 29 from them, and India finished 24 runs short at 223 for 9. The verdict doing the rounds since has been generous to him: hardly any of those balls came in the powerplay, so he never found the rhythm an opener needs before the field goes out, and the middle overs were always going to be hard work. His own record makes the innings look stranger still. Across every men's T20, international and league, between October 2024 and October 2026, Sharma has a strike rate of 193.2, against a strike rate of 130.1 for top-seven batters in the same matches, so Hyderabad was an innings at well under his usual pace.

How Sharma's recent innings have gone

The picture of an opener who settles in the powerplay and carries that tempo into the middle overs is hard to check against Sharma's recent scores, because almost none of them lasted long enough to test it. They are bursts: 21 from 10 balls and 20 from 12 in the first two T20Is against West Indies, 7 from 3 against Sri Lanka, and even his 61 from 28 against Pakistan and 69 from 30 in Indore were done within 30 deliveries. Of his last ten innings, Hyderabad is the only one that was both long and slow, which means the defence rests on a single evening.

The trade-off India have chosen with Sharma

Any criticism needs tempering: the rhythm argument has a point, since a batter who scores this way has no middle gear to drop into when the quick start does not come, and India's bowlers conceded 247 for 3, which no opener recovers by himself. The corollary of a role built on hitting from the start is that the quiet innings, when it arrives, is a cost of the plan rather than a failing of the man. Our ratings have Sharma as the second-best men's T20 batter in the world, worth 8.24 runs a match more than an average player, and that ranking was earned by exactly the harum-scarum starts India have asked of him.

Should Sharma carry the blame for Hyderabad?

No, though the reason is his record rather than the powerplay. One slow innings in ten, from a batter rated this highly, is an exception, and one innings is too few to show that a thin powerplay drags his tempo down. So the sensible call for Bengaluru on Saturday, where our forecast gives India a 58% chance, is to keep Sharma opening and let the fifth T20I show whether a fuller share of the powerplay brings the usual tempo back.