“I’m not here to score lots and lots of runs. I’m here to score a small amount of runs which is very effective for the team.”
Sanju Samson said this in May 2022, on the YouTube show Breakfast With Champions. He had just been dropped from India’s T20I squad for a series against South Africa, and in effect been told he wasn’t in the selectors’ plans for that year’s T20 World Cup. He had been dropped after scoring 39 off 25 and 18 off 12 in his last two T20Is. He had been dropped in the middle of a typical IPL season for him: he was among the top ten run-getters and had the third-highest strike rate of the ten, but he was the only one of them with a sub-30 average.
In May 2022, the world of Indian T20 cricket wasn’t what it is today. In that world, Samson’s statement could be read as a challenge and a provocation. Uttered today, his words would lack the charge they then possessed. Today, it’s how most of the world views T20.
When he made that statement, Samson was 27, a man who had batted like the T20 batter of 2026 for most of his career. He was in his tenth IPL season, and the captain of his franchise. He was a superstar who had barely made a dent in international cricket, or had the chance to, having played just 12 T20Is and one ODI.
Samson’s ESPNcricinfo profile still begins with this sentence: “Sanju Samson was perhaps the first top-drawer Indian player to be known primarily for his feats for his IPL franchise than for the national side.”
The profile probably needs an update, but that sentence still rings true, even if Indian cricket, in the months and years since May 2022, has gradually found a place in its heart for Samson. Indian cricket has caught up with him – slowly and painfully at first, and then at a pace so bewildering that it can sometimes appear to have overtaken him.
When India won the T20 World Cup in 2024, Samson spent the entire tournament on the bench. He had had to wait a long time, and his time hadn’t yet come, but it seemed imminent. At the start of this T20 World Cup, he seemed once more in danger of spending all of it on the bench, this time at 31. In the squad, out of form, not in the first XI, and without a clear way back in given the way the rest of the batters were performing.
He also no longer offered a point of difference in terms of approach. In broad terms, pretty much every India batter now batted like him, aiming to be in for a good time, not a long time. And Samson’s younger colleagues hadn’t had to fight the establishment to make their point: not to the degree he had had to. The establishment now understood the trade-offs that allowed a rare and precious talent like Abhishek Sharma to score as quickly as he did. The establishment of 2026, to put it simply, would never drop a batter like that simply for scoring three successive ducks.
A batter on the inside would now need to go through a prolonged rough patch, and provide reasons beyond mere low scores, to find himself on the outside.
Sanju Samson soaks in an all-timer of a T20 innings•Getty Images
In the year leading up to this World Cup, Samson happened to go through two such patches. First, in a home series against England, he kept getting out to fast, short bowling against an attack unusually good at that mode of bowling. That, perhaps, contributed to India recalling Shubman Gill at the top of the order and unsettling Samson, pushing him into an unfamiliar middle-order role initially, and then dropping him for Jitesh Sharma, a keeper more at home in that role.
Then, after India went back to their earlier team structure, with Gill and Jitesh out and Samson re-established as opener, he went through a horror run – he was, to borrow Suryakumar Yadav’s pet expression, not just out of runs but out of form too – with the World Cup imminent. And he went through it just when another player fitting his exact job description, Ishan Kishan, was in the form of his life.
Unlike so many times in the past, Samson wasn’t on the outside because the establishment didn’t trust him. He was on the outside because others who could do what he does happened to be doing it better at the time. Indian cricket had caught up with Samson. And it appeared to have overtaken him.
Sometimes, though, fate intervenes in the oddest of ways. If Samson didn’t offer a point of difference in terms of how he batted, he did at a more basic level: in the way he stood at the crease. In a time of left-handed excess, and at a time when that excess was causing India problems, he offered the virtue of right-handedness. And if that still wasn’t enough of a reason for India to slot him back in, a space opened up because of external circumstances.
Suryakumar Yadav doffs his cap to Sanju Samson•ICC/Getty Images
On Sunday at Eden Gardens, breathing air rich in comebacks and fairytales, Samson met the moment he had dreamed of all his life. He was playing his 328th T20 game; only ten Indian players – Rohit Sharma (463), Dinesh Karthik (415), Virat Kohli (414), MS Dhoni (405), Suryakumar (358), Ravindra Jadeja (346), Suresh Raina (336), Shikhar Dhawan (334), R Ashwin (333), Yuzvendra Chahal (329) – had played as many. He had, by many measures, proved himself at international level; only four batters have bettered his three T20I hundreds.
But Samson had built that immense body of work without playing an innings of instant recall to the world beyond cricket’s most dedicated tragics.
Every innings matters, and it takes the edifice of innings in bilaterals and innings in group-stage matches for a team to get to a position where it needs someone to play an innings of substance in a knockout or virtual knockout game. They all count.
Samson knows this; until Sunday, he might have defended that position with his life. But he has lived through Sunday now, lived the role of protagonist in a drama that condensed a career and a life into 50 balls over 108 minutes. He has, at long last, arrived.
It took its time, but Indian cricket embraced Sanju Samson, going as far as shaping itself in his image. On Sunday, he returned the embrace.
Karthik Krishnaswamy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo
