Sanju Samson smacked 10 sixes in total in the opening game of the T20I series against South Africa in Durban. Among all those bazooka hits, a single stroke was enough to gauge the calibre of his stunning 50-ball 107. In the 13th over bowled by the medium pacer, Andile Simelane, Samson employed his back foot trigger. The next frame of the action was about Samson taking a step forward to unfurl an eye-popping lofted stroke over long-off.
Samson too perhaps enjoyed that sumptuous stroke. For a moment, he looked up and then didn’t even bat an eyelid as he watched the ball sail into the stands. That one stroke also told something about Samson’s pedigree as a batter. Right at that juncture, just a quick glance at Samson’s record was enough to assess that he has had a chequered international career. Whether people have been unfair on him is a different debate altogether. For the record, the wicketkeeper-bat has played only 50 limited-overs games since he made his India debut in Zimbabwe.
Earlier in the year, he couldn’t find a place in the playing XI during India’s victorious T20 World Cup campaign in the Caribbean and the USA. To make matters worse, he couldn’t even score a run in the T20I rubber in Sri Lanka. With Samson approaching 30 years of age, one wondered whether the Indian think-tank would continue to show faith in the wicketkeeper-bat.
The backroom staff comprising Gautam Gambhir and Suryakumar Yadav, however, backed Samson. Soon, Samson charted a turnaround with a whirlwind hundred in the T20I series against Bangladesh. The bigger picture to emerge from these two hundreds is Samson seems to have finally established his place in the Indian side in the shortest format.
Rohit Sharma, the former skipper, who opened the batting for a period of time, has retired from T20Is. Virat Kohli too took the same decision after the World Cup final versus South Africa in Barbados. Abhishek Sharma, Samson’s current opening partner, is not making his chances count. In that backdrop, Shubman Gill and Yashasvi Jaiswal could be in contention for the other opening slot.
It is true that Rishabh Pant is still in the mix. But with due respect to one of India’s finest Test cricketers, his stats in T20Is don’t make for a great reading: 1209 runs at a strike rate of 127.26. There is a school of thought that if a pace bowler ends up bowling relatively fuller lengths and in the channel outside the off-stump, Pant struggles a bit to score runs through that area.
Meanwhile, Samson explored almost every nook and cranny of the ground in the first T20I in Durban. Yes, he might find it a little more difficult to force the pace on slower wickets. But with India elevating him to the top of the order, that vexing problem is set to be solved. Samson now has the license to play with freedom in the powerplay and there is the added advantage of the new ball coming on to the bat.
There has never been any doubt over Samson’s gift-wrapped skills. Even as far back as 2013, in a Rajasthan Royals-Royal Challengers Bangalore IPL game, an 18-year-old Samson had crunched a splendid loft off Murali Karthik. The memory of that shot is evocative. Not because of the unruffled elegance on display. But more so because the stroke gave the impression that Samson has immense potential to succeed at higher levels.
More than a decade later, when Samson essayed a sublime loft in Kingsmead, there was a gut feel that the wicketkeeper-bat has finally found his mojo in the international arena.