Sean Abbott stuns Kent - and himself - with 34-ball hundred

Surrey 223 for 5 (Abbott 110*) beat Kent 182 for 7 (Muyeye 59, Bell-Drummond 52) by 41 runsSean Abbott's first thought about a glorious night he could never have envisaged was that he is no Andrew Symonds with the bat. That made his intervention at the Kia Oval all the more remarkable. He now shares with Symonds the joint-fastest T20 hundred ever made in England and the fourth fastest in T20 history after his 34-ball romp for Surrey in front of 17,000 spectators. He is no mean cricketer, but he just kept smiling at the absurdity of it all.Kent had been pleasantly stunned by Symonds' hundred that night in Maidstone back in 2004 as the potential of T20 began to dawn. This time they were the fall guys, their control of Surrey's top-order abruptly surrendered to one of those nights when a recognised lower-order batter simply discovers a power within themselves that has never previously been witnessed.Nigh-on two decades have followed since Symonds' revelation of T20's potential. Then the game invited scepticism and suspicion even in the country that had been daring and forward-thinking enough to present it to the world. As Abbott underlined once more, it has since become a game where anything is possible."I don't think people should be thinking about me and 'Roy' in the same breath," Abbott said, moments after his unbeaten 110 from 41 balls with four fours and 11 sixes (all but one between long on and deep square) became just the latest tale of the unexpected. "But it was a lot of fun. I was just grateful to find the middle of the bat."He found it so often on his debut T20 appearance at Kia Oval that he now stands only four balls adrift of Chris Gayle's all-time record. He achieved the feat in the penultimate over by drilling his fellow Australian, the veteran seamer Michael Hogan, for successive sixes over extra cover. This from a seam bowler whose average in T20 was 10.91, who had never made more than 41 in 76 previous innings in this format, and who made only 51 runs as an afterthought in Sydney Sixers' 2022-23 Bi