Dubai: He was an integral part of an U-19 World Cup-winning Indian team but it took Abhishek Sharma more than six years to break into the senior set-up and he is glad that he wasn’t fast-tracked like some of his batch-mates.
Within a year of the 2018 junior World Cup triumph, his erstwhile skipper Prithvi Shaw made his Test debut and best buddy Shubman Gill broke into the ODI side.
Abhishek agrees that while they took the “lift”, he benefitted from taking the “staircase”.
The 25-year-old was India’s standout batter in the just-concluded Asia Cup, amassing 314 runs in seven games with three scores of 50-plus and an astounding strike-rate of nearly 200. “Some get straight (into the team). Some do everything. So I felt that I needed to do everything. Because as a player, if I had come straight into the team, then I would not have got a chance to learn all the things that I did learn,” he said.
The years spent in domestic cricket helped him sharpen his skills and know more about his own game. “I got a lot of time to try many things. To work on my game as normally, many players do not get that chance,” Abhishek said.