A sheepish grin flashed across Sanju Samson’s face when he was caught at long-on after a thrillingly graceful knock of 89 off 46 balls. He was just 11 runs from a century that would have been the crown jewel in a tournament he has defined. But it was probably the mode of dismissal that rankled him — mistiming a low full toss. He was in sumptuous touch till then, sweet-spotting every ball and playing to a gallery that was twisting their tongues over “chetta” (elder brother in Malayalam). The DJ had even rustled up a few Malayalam chartbusters to liven up the mood.
Later on Sunday night, after he was named “player of the tournament”, there was that sheepish grin again. This time, when he let the world in on a secret. “I hope I can share it here. From the last couple of months, I have been in constant touch with Sachin (Tendulkar) sir. When I was sitting outside in Australia, I was not playing a game. So I thought, ‘okay, what is the mindset required now?’ So I reached out to sir and I had big conversations with him, and even yesterday, he called up to check how I am feeling,” Sanju said.
“If I am getting guidance from someone like him, what more can I ask for? That clarity, that game preparation, that game awareness, that game sense… I am very grateful for everyone who supported me,” he said.
The World Cup itself, he said, “feels like a dream… a bit surreal”.
Then, speaking about his journey, Sanju said, “I think this started a couple of years before when I was with the 2024 World Cup winning team in West Indies. I couldn’t play a game. I kept on visualizing, I kept on dreaming, I kept on working… I needed to put in so much work that this is exactly what I wanted to achieve. And by God’s grace, I think today things have turned around.”
The lowest point, he revealed, was “after the New Zealand series” last year. “I was broke(n)… I was completely out of my mind. I was like, ‘okay, my dreams have shattered. What else can I do?’ But God had different plans. I suddenly came back in the crucial games and I did what I could for my country. I am very proud and very happy that I was courageous enough to dream about it. And actually, things have turned up so nicely for me,” he said.
Sanju is not someone who fixates on milestones and numbers. After his 89 in the Mumbai semifinal against England, he had said, “I haven’t missed two centuries. I have scored one 97 and one 89. It is a very big deal. I am very grateful for that.” In the final, he missed the hundred again but it was yet another match-winning knock, beyond his childhood dream.
That phase of regret after his dismissal was fleeting, as he retreated to the dug-out with a big, content smile. He took one step at a time as he climbed the long stairway to the dressing room. He was soaking in the moment, probably recounting every stroke he uncorked on an electric night when the music blared from the speakers and the crowd revelled in the barrage of fours and maximums. Or, he might have been wondering at the strange paths his destiny had traversed.
Before the tournament, he was the forgotten one. Riding a slump, the bat’s sweet-spot unstained, his career a step away from falling apart. But for India’s left-hand heavy batting order and the off-spin vulnerability that threatened to derail the campaign, Sanju would not have returned. Before the South Africa game, captain Suryakumar Yadav had quipped: “Who would I replace (for Sanju)? Tilak (Varma) or Abhishek (Sharma)?” Batting coach Sitanshu Kotak had said that Sanju batted a lot in the nets because there were few right-handers in the squad for bowlers to practice.
One last chance beckoned him. A failure against the West Indies in a must-win game, he knew, had the possibility of ending his career. But Sanju did not let pressure wither him. Instead, he chose the breaks to bend the script to his will. Not far from his house in Vizhinjam in Kerala’s southernmost district of Thiruvananthapuram, there is a statue of Christ the Redeemer, a replica of the one in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro. In the last three games, all virtual knockouts, he has been India’s saviour. It required not only tremendous skill but also fortitude.
All three knocks had different flavours. The 97 not out against the West Indies was the most emotional one. Tears rolled down his face and melted with sweat as he knelt on the turf and kissed a silent prayer. The 89 in Mumbai was the flashiest one, when he unfurled a flurry of gorgeous strokes with carefree abandon. The 89 in Ahmedabad, the highest score ever in a T20 World Cup final, was the most defining one, the knock that over a lakh spectators would remember for a lifetime — a treatise on controlled hitting that would form the gold standard of T20 batting, an elusive space where art blends with aggression.
He smashed five fours and eight sixes, including three successive maximums of Rachin Ravindra. But one stroke without muscle captured the sweetness of his batting. In the tenth over of the game, Jimmy Neesham nailed the near-perfect yorker on the fifth stump, but Sanju simply opened the bat face and steered it past third man. Few batsmen have such dexterous hands in the world, malleable wrists that he could flex as he wants them to.
It was arguably Sanju’s most composed knock. He was quiet, batting in a self-contained trance, like an implacable Little Buddha. He wore no expressions, as though he was entirely in a world unto his own. Among India’s phalanx of T20 destroyers, he is the most graceful one, coaxing boundaries without breaking a sweat, harnessing the pace and stretching the limits of orthodox strokes. He let Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan seize the attacking initiative. But from the tenth over, he raised his momentum for a furious end game. He pulled and drove Lockie Ferguson for a brace of gorgeous sixes, strokes gleaned from the textbook, a wondrous exhibition of straight-batted destruction.
It’s the enduring beauty of his batting that has impressed, among others, Kumar Sangakkara and Rahul Dravid, two stalwarts of the game. The Sri Lankan legend would tell ICC: “He’s a special player and when he’s fresh and focused there’s nothing he can’t do. He’s a humble, grounded guy… not much on social media. He tends to like a lot of privacy, cares for the rest of the group. Those are great qualities to have apart from talent and skill.”