Sanju Samson’s new bad habit signals red alert for his opening career

Sanju Samson emerged as India’s premier T20I opener when he struck three T20I centuries in five games. The batter from Kerala finally had a chance to make the most of the long run he was gonna get at the top of the order in India’s T20I team. 

Until then, his career had been a case of ‘What if’. This was his moment to seize the opportunity by the scruff of its neck because if he didn’t do that, he had a generational talent in Yashasvi Jaiswal waiting in the wings.

However, in the ongoing T20I series against England, he acquired a bad habit of getting out playing the same shot on the same kind of deliveries. 

Every time Samson has been dismissed in this five-match series, it has been while trying to take on the short delivery that has pitched in the line of the stump. He attempted to play with a horizontal bat each time and got caught on the on the side between deep backward square leg and mid-on. 

He even chose the same bowler to get out to in the first three games - Jofra Archer. The reason was evident. Archer’s extra pace made it hard for Samson to time the ball with a horizontal bat. 

However, in the fourth T20I today in Pune, he was dismissed by Saqib Mahmood on a delivery that was just 129 kmph. So it isn’t just the case of Samson being late on the ball; the keeper-batter has failed to get underneath the body line deliveries and swat them away. 

All of these issues have caused his average to fall to just 4.6 against the short deliveries in this series. Before this series, he had averaged 28.9 on short deliveries in all T20s since 2022. So clearly, it’s a problem that he hasn’t faced throughout his career. 

Samson needs to address his inability to hit deliveries that are pitched either on back of a length or on the shorter side, coming towards his body. It’s not an easy problem to solve, but Samson has generally been proactive in making adjustments to eliminate technical errors. 

While it won’t be improbable to see him play the fifth T20I despite the four consecutive failures, Samson is already on thin ice. If his short ball problem isn’t solved, he might fall short of making the playing 11 very soon.