Sanju Samson Becomes ‘That Guy’

Earlier this year in January, India faced New Zealand in a bilateral T20 international at Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala. It was the 5th and final game of the series and the last one India would play ahead of the T20 World Cup slated to start a week from the day. 

The Indian captain Suryakumar Yadav at the time of the toss announced three changes in the playing XI. He took two names but struggled to recall the third one. But probably sensing the anxiety it might just begin to induce among the large swathes of Malayali faithful assembled in the stands, Surya immediately assured everyone ‘Sanju Samson IS playing’. 

A raucous roar followed along the most predictable lines. There was no way Kerala’s favourite son was going to be kept out of the team in front of his home crowd. But Surya inadvertently ended up hinting at the apprehension over Sanju’s place in the Indian T20 team heading into the World Cup. 

Sanju Samson celebrates his half century during the ICC Men's T20 World Cup 2026 final cricket match between India and New Zealand at Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat on March 8, 2026. Photo: PTI/Kunal Patil.

In the year leading up to the tournament, Sanju had lost his preferred batting position before finding himself on the bench. Against all odds, he’d been trusted with the opening spot again but with a streak of poor returns and a repeated pattern of dismissals meant he was fast running out of the faith the team management had reposed in him for so long.

Nestled somewhere in Surya’s words at the toss in Thiruvananthapuram that day, was a subtle signal that it might well have already been curtains for Sanju if the game were being played elsewhere. But perhaps this might just be the ground for him to finally find his lost touch. That was obviously not to be as Sanju only managed to score six runs before skying one to the third man.

An hour later, as the Indian team took the field to defend the total, Sanju was asked to hand over his wicketkeeping gloves to Ishan Kishan. It couldn’t have gotten any more direct than that. This was the end of the rope. At least for now. It had all been building up for nearly a decade. This was the moment for it all to come together now. But it was not to be. Sanju Samson would not feature in India’s playing XI for the T20 World Cup…. Or would he?

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It’s been well over a decade now since Sanju forayed into the Indian Premier League. And he’s been a top-dollar player for at least half that duration. There’s always been a certain lustre to his batting. 

Those drives on the up flow that much smoother than they would with an average batsman. Those sixes off the front-foot off relatively full balls leave one astonished at his ability to pick lengths early. Sanju’s range-hitting against various types of matchups has been a striking feature of the IPL even before most figured out the term range-hitting or matchup.

And yet somehow, he manages to cut a frustrating figure among both admirers and detractors alike; perhaps even more so among the admirers. Those streaks of brilliance feel sporadic and seldom translate into a consistently bankable source of runs. One of the most common complaints with Sanju throughout his IPL career has been he starts the seasons with so much promise only for the runs to soon dry up. He’s not a match-winner you know? He’s not ‘that guy’, you know?

Cricket discourse has forever been cursed with coinage of the ‘that guy’ phrase. The mythical ‘guy’ is supposed to be someone who allows you to have faith in your team regardless of the situation for as long as he’s still around. It inevitably has always got to be a batsman. The bowlers do not have that privilege.

In collective imagination of those who buy into this folkloric phenomenon, scoring runs isn’t on its own enough. That guy doesn’t stop at that. He scores ‘runs that matter’. He isn’t just in the business to pad his stats and be done with his job. His runs are consequential. They take the team home.

None of these postulations care about being rooted in science or statistics. But they do have a very deep emotional appeal and continue to resonate among the masses who beyond a point aren’t the most literate with the mechanics of the sport they think they love. Masses love a rescuer, a saviour, a liberator who wins them games as opposed to merely scoring runs.

Sanju never stood a chance at attaining this validation as he’d embraced the brand of T20 cricket that India took a few years too many to come to terms with. The format doesn’t afford one the luxury of carving out main-character narratives by batting long periods. It’s an extremely condensed version of the sport that requires one to be willing to play consistently high-risk cricket and not be particularly sensitive to cheaper returns.

It was quite fitting that the moment India recalibrated their T20 mindset and phased out the senior superstars, Sanju became one of the batting mainstays. It’s not like he hadn’t had his opportunities in India colours before. But he’d never quite been offered the kind of run that allowed him to showcase the upside of having him around. 

The thinking at the time didn’t exactly view Sanju’s game the way it needed to be. His response to a delicate situation would often be taking even higher risks as opposed to hedging his bets for a latter phase of the innings. Gautam Gambhir and Ajit Agarkar to their credit had a more evolved view of T20 batting and it showed in the amount of faith they were willing to extend to Sanju.

That it isn’t necessarily a ‘failure’ in T20s if a batsman is dismissed cheaply trying to hit a six without wasting too many balls. The standards of what qualifies as a ‘respectable’ score too need to be looked at with a much more advanced lens. Until Indian think-tank underwent this attitude adjustment, Sanju remained an anomaly whose best years may very well have been lost to troglodytic thinking.

India played four T20Is in South Africa towards the end of 2024. Sanju scored two hundreds in the series, striking at around 200 both times. In the other two games, he got out without scoring, but more importantly within the first three balls he faced. In an earlier time, this streak might’ve been viewed very differently from the way the Gambhir-Agarkar-Surya management did. This is exactly the brand of cricket they’ve wanted to be hard-wired in India’s T20 DNA.

And that is exactly why after reshuffling him through the batting order to make room for India’s foremost all-format superstar Shubman Gill in the T20 lineup, the management eventually went back to Sanju as the major event approached. He hadn’t made a compelling case for himself during his time out but the management had the perfect idea of what he offered.

Sanju losing out his place as the first-choice opener to Ishan Kishan at the start of the World Cup had more to it than merely a string of low scores in the series against New Zealand. His hitting base looked all over the place. He was standing too deep in the crease and too leg side of the ball to be able to fully access most parts of the field. His technique needed drastic fixes and it didn’t look like happening any time soon.

It was buoyant and desperate in equal measure on part of India’s leadership group when they brought Sanju back in the middle of the tournament. It needed a rearrangement of the batting order. It involved going back to a player they’d seemingly lost confidence in not too long ago. But perhaps the left-handed loaded top order was proving to be too much of a bottleneck that urgently needed breaking.

Sanju Samson, left, and Abhishek Sharma during the ICC Men's T20 World Cup 2026 final cricket match between India and New Zealand at Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat on March 8, 2026. Photo: PTI/Shailendra Bhojak.

Sanju’s inclusion had more to do with the star opener Abhishek Sharma being able to start his innings without having to worry about facing off-spin – a matchup that had become his nemesis in the tournament. It wouldn’t matter if Sanju got out cheaply as long as he hit a few boundaries at the start and broke that stranglehold teams were deploying against India’s openers.

But Sanju obviously wasn’t out there to offer just that. Whatever remodeling of technique it took from the time of the New Zealand series but he was immediately batting at a visibly higher level. Right from what was effectively a quarter-final against the West Indies, there was flair and fluency in his batting that were unrecognisable from the batsman he was when he’d last donned the India blues.

The body was going into the shot rather than hanging back uptight. The bat-swing was pretty telling of where his game was at. What immediately told his game apart from the previous series was how well he dealt with left-arm spin. A match-up that right-handers aren’t the most comfortable negotiating is actually one of Sanju’s stronger suits. If he’s dominating that particular variety of bowling, it’s pretty easy to tell his batting in the best possible place.

From Akeal Hosein and Gudakesh Motie to Liam Dawson and Rachin Ravindra, Sanju deposited every single one of them into the stands with remarkable nonchalance. But when it came to New Zealand’s premium spin weapon Mitchell Santner, he was quite happy playing that spell out safely. The spread of risk was very carefully calibrated. 

There was clear thought behind the shifting of gears through different phases and matchups. What must’ve felt especially rewarding was that he was able to dominate Jofra Archer and Matt Henry in the semifinal and the final respectively. The two bowlers who’d managed to do his confidence dirty in the buildup to the tournament didn’t come anywhere close to challenging him again.

Players go their entire careers longing for that one legacy-stealing night that they get to own for the rest of their lives. The fans unfortunately aren’t uniformly invested in every single game they tune in to watch. The weight of emotions attached to world tournaments is infinitely greater. Performances on this stage register that much more deeply and are received and retold that much more fervently.

Sanju carved out not one, not two, but three of them. On the bounce. With each being a knockout contest. In what could have very realistically been his last tournament for India. In three greatly different situations. That he was able to ace every single one of them and emerged as the unlikeliest talisman of India’s triumphant campaign is the most astounding possible feat.

Sanju Samson celebrates with the tournament trophy after India won the ICC Men's T20 World Cup 2026 at Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad on March 8, 2026. Photo: PTI/Kunal Patil.

Sanju for some inexplicable reason has always remained an extremely popular player; a fan-favourite, a crowd puller. Initially it was limited to Kerala and the Malayali diaspora in the Gulf. It however hasn’t remained strictly tribal anymore and has evolved into something much bigger. But he didn’t have the signature performances on his resume to match the fanaticism he generates among his fans. 

At the start of the tournament, when Sanju was not part of the playing XI, Rohit Sharma can be seen consoling him in a video that has since gone viral. ‘Dukhi mat ho, bhai! It’s a long tournament. Mauka kabhi bhi aa sakta hai’ (Don’t be disheartened. It’s a long tournament, your chance may come knocking out of nowhere), Rohit can be heard saying.

The chance indeed came knocking out of nowhere. A week-long run between Kolkata, Mumbai, and Ahmedabad however has pretty much cemented his place in Indian cricket’s folklore. That overzealous roar that he attracts has finally been vindicated. The streets have been won. It took well over a decade. But Sanju Samson is finally that guy.

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