A year ago, Abhishek Sharma stood at the summit of the game, the Player of the Tournament award from the 2025 Asia Cup in one hand, the keys to a new car in the other, 315 runs and three half-centuries behind him. And even then, mid-celebration, he seemed to already know what was coming. “If you play like this, there will be failures,” he said.

He wasn’t wrong. He just didn’t know how the story would end.

The failures arrived with a timing that felt almost designed. A 484-run IPL 2025 season had convinced everyone he would walk into international cricket without breaking stride, and for a while he did exactly that, a century in only his second match for India, then 1,115 runs across the rest of the year, 268 clear of the next best Indian batter on the list. The arc only ever bent upward. Then it bent back.

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At the T20 World Cup, 141 runs left him 37th on the run charts, behind men for whom batting is a side hustle rather than a calling. A trophy can hide a lot, but against Zimbabwe in July, the mask came off completely: scores of 1, 8 and 2, arriving at the exact moment a quieter war was being fought over his place, between the World Cup’s Player of the Tournament, Sanju Samson, and IPL 2026’s leading run-scorer, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. Abhishek was on borrowed time, and everyone could see it.

On Thursday, under the lights at the Arun Jaitley Stadium, he paid it all back, one six at a time.

Sunday had offered a glimpse of the comeback, a 53-ball 82. Thursday was the whole picture. In the final of the three-match series against Afghanistan, Abhishek reached a century in 30 deliveries, the fastest by any Indian in the format.

Abhishek Sharma holds a yoga pose after reaching his century in just 30 balls against Afghanistan.

It didn’t start like ruin. The first over, off Fazalhaq Farooqi, produced an exquisitely timed, delicately placed lofted cover drive, and little else, the left-armer even got away with a couple of respectful dot balls. Whatever restraint that suggested was gone by the second over. A pull dismissed with disdain over square leg. A charge down the pitch that ended in a loft over the covers. Azmatullah Omarzai carried the weight of both. Farooqi, back for his second over, fared no better, two more sixes and, as if for balance, two fours besides.

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Ibrahim Zadran could have looked in any direction on his field and found no one willing to bowl. The sport doesn’t care about seniority in these moments, and Mohammad Nabi discovered that at 41, not because of his age but because he happened to be next in line. The fifty came in an over that leaked 29 runs, 16 of them off Abhishek’s bat alone, 16 deliveries in total to get there, the joint-fourth fastest fifty by an Indian in the format, and the sixth time in his career he had done it inside 20 balls.

He was only getting started. Mujeeb-ur-Rahman went the same way as everyone before him, Abdullah Ahmadzai after that, 51 runs off fourteen balls carrying him from fifty to a hundred in thirty deliveries total, the fastest T20I century by a player from any Test-playing nation, third fastest overall behind only Estonia’s Sahil Chauhan and Turkey’s Muhammad Fahad. The end, when it came in the tenth over, arrived almost incidentally, an attempt to smash a Rashid Khan googly into the stands instead finding Rahmanullah Gurbaz’s gloves. By then he had 108 off 34 balls, 102 of those runs in boundaries alone, as though the very idea of running between the wickets had never occurred to him.

The record he took had belonged to Rohit Sharma since 2017, a 35-ball century against Sri Lanka in Indore. Virat Kohli, watching from wherever former captains watch these things, now shares the summit for most T20I centuries with ten apiece, alongside whoever else the format has produced. Ahead of both of them sit only Chris Gayle and Babar Azam, and after Thursday, they might want to check over their shoulders too.

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He said there would be failures. There were. He never said what he would do to the record books on the other side of them.