Yuvraj Singh's cheeky ‘singles too’ remark after Abhishek Sharma's record-breaking ton

New Delhi: The third T20I of the five-match series between India and New Zealand was not just another win. It was an innings from Abhishek Sharma that effectively settled the series inside the first 13 overs of the chase. Abhishek smashed 113 off 38 balls, including nine fours and eleven sixes, and reached his century off just 35 balls. India restricted New Zealand to under 200 and won by six wickets with 40 balls to spare, taking an unassailable 3-0 lead. The chase was completed in 13.2 overs, meaning the death overs were never needed. In T20I cricket, that is a dominance profile rather than a narrow win. After the match, former India all-rounder Yuvraj Singh posted a cheeky reaction on X, saying Abhishek had ‘taken his singles too’. The joke was statistically accurate. Of Abhishek’s 113 runs, 102 came in boundaries — 90.3 per cent. He hit 20 boundary balls, 52.6 per cent of the 38 deliveries he faced, and scored 11 runs off the other 18 balls. That is why Yuvraj’s remark was more than a laugh line: it described the near-pure boundary-or-nothing method behind the innings. Yuvraj also joked that he could not score a hundred off 30 or 34 balls. That is factually true: Yuvraj has no T20I century, and his most famous T20I knocks were a 12-ball 50 and a 30-ball 70 at the 2026 World T20. Abhishek’s dismissal also underlined the risk in his method. He was caught at deep mid-wicket by Glenn Phillips off Kyle Jamieson, the standard failure mode for a boundary-heavy approach. When 90 per cent of runs come from fours and sixes, the margin for error is tiny. A slower pitch, a bigger boundary or one early mistimed shot can turn 113 off 38 into 25 off 14. That makes the innings both spectacular and fragile. It proves the ceiling exists; it does not prove the average. A statistical caution is essential. The report mentions 11 hundreds, but T20I centuries and all-T20 centuries are separate categories. Virat Kohli has one T20I hundred, so the figure of 11 can only be an all-T20 aggregate including IPL and domestic cricket. Presenting it as an India T20I record would be a category error and could create a false public benchmark. The T20I and all-T20 numbers must be kept apart. The match also highlighted Sanju Samson’s role. A senior top-order batter was asked to bat at No. 3, a sacrifice that changes entry conditions and often reduces balls faced. Yuvraj called Samson a complete team man, a fair tactical observation. He also named young batter Vaibhav Sooryavanshi and said an opening combination with Abhishek could be devastating. That is a qualitative endorsement, not a performance claim; the report provides no data on Sooryavanshi. For New Zealand, the match was difficult on both skill and conditions. The report says their bowlers had few answers, but India’s home surfaces naturally blunt a seam reliant attack. This is a structural matchup issue as much as a quality gap. With the series already decided, matches four and five are dead rubbers; for India they are a chance to manage workload, rotate players and test bench depth. The bigger risk is narrative: one exceptional innings is being treated as a career arrival. Abhishek has shown the ceiling, but without T20I career base rates, home-away splits and evidence away from flat home pitches, the ‘new superstar’ claim remains ahead of the data.