India batter Abhishek Sharma had a priceless reaction when he got to know that Josh Hazlewood will be missing rest of the series as he is set to begin his preparations for The Ashes and will be seen playing in the Sheffield Shield. Notably, Hazlewood was adjudged the Player of the Match for his terrific 4-over spell of 3/13 that decimated the Men in Blue's top-order. He took the key wickets of Shubman Gill, Suryakumar Yadav and Tilak Varma and played a massive role in the Aussies bundling out the visitors for only 125 runs.
After the match, Abhishek was asked how he feels about Hazlewood missing the rest of the three matches in the series. The India batter was left shocked to hear this and said that he enjoyed the challenge of playing against him.
"Oh, is he? I didn't know this, but obviously, I mean, he's good enough to play all the formats, but still I was enjoying this challenge because somehow as a batter, you have to face the world-class bowlers, and that's what I was trying to do," Abhishek said at the post-match press-conference.
Abhishek on Hazlewood's bowling
Abhishek further remarked that he was left surprised with how well Hazlewood was bowling during the match and added that even though he had his eye on him during the ODI series, he still provided a lot of challenges for him.
"I think as a batter, I was watching him in in the ODIs as well. So somehow we knew that he's gonna give us this much difficulty and challenges. So obviously, the way he bowled today, even I got surprised. I haven't seen something like this in T20s," Abhishek stated.
"That's something new for me as well, because I'm a batter that wants to dominate, but when I was seeing on the other side that how he's bowling and even to me as well, seems like he had a plan and he was just executing it," he added.
Abhishek's stellar knock in Melbourne
Meanwhile, despite Hazlewood posing a lot of difficulty for Abhishek, the latter played a fine knock of 68 runs at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. He was once again seen batting fearlessly and hit 8 boundaries and 2 sixes in his explosive inning. Iff bit wasn't for him, the visitors wouldn't have even been able to cross the 100-run mark.