Sanju Samson’s India story has never been a straight line. It has been a career of peaks and pauses, of glittering nights and cold sidelines, of a player good enough to light up a World Cup yet still unsure if his name will be on the next team sheet.
Ravichandran Ashwin has seen enough to call it what it is: a brutal mental battle.
A decade of stop-start
Samson first walked into international cricket in 2014, a precocious wicketkeeper-batter from Kerala with timing to burn and a reputation for clean, fearless hitting. Twelve years on, he is not a rookie, not a veteran, but something in between – a player India call on, then move past, then call on again.
That is the crux of Ashwin’s concern. For Samson, opportunities have not arrived in a smooth, predictable stream. They have come in bursts, often under intense scrutiny, and vanished just as quickly.
Ashwin laid it out starkly. Samson dazzled on the biggest stage at the 2026 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, where he was named Player of the Tournament. He then went to Ireland and stood out again while most of the batting unit struggled. The trajectory looked obvious: this was finally his time.
Then came England.
One failure in a T20I, and the familiar pattern returned. Samson was out of the XI for the second game of the series in July, replaced by young Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. Samson came back for the final match, but the damage to his rhythm – and perhaps his trust in the system – had already been done. Soon after, he disappeared from the T20I squad for the Zimbabwe tour altogether.
From World Cup hero to watching from home
The contrast is jarring. Player of the Tournament at a World Cup one month, left out of a T20I squad the next. That kind of swing does not just test form; it tests faith.
When Afghanistan arrived on the schedule, Samson finally got another look. He returned to the XI for the opening T20I, walked out with expectation heavy on his shoulders, and scratched his way to 10 off eight balls. No time to build an innings. No second life. Just another number that critics could throw back at him.
Every innings becomes a referendum. Every failure, a fresh justification for dropping him. Every success, a stick to beat the selectors with for not trusting him earlier.
That is the environment Ashwin is talking about.
Living under comparison
In Ashwin’s view, Samson is not just battling his own numbers. He is trapped in a permanent comparison with Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, the younger contender waiting for the same role.
When Samson plays, the noise starts. If he scores, voices rise to say, “We told you so back then.” If he fails, the same chorus flips: he’s inconsistent, he never delivers, he’s blocking Sooryavanshi’s path.
Ashwin captured that confusion bluntly. The criticism, he suggested, is not always clear. Is the anger aimed at Samson’s dismissal, or at Sooryavanshi being left out because Samson got the nod? That ambiguity, that constant sense of being judged against someone else’s potential as much as your own performance, eats away at a player.
For Samson, that means walking out to bat knowing he is not just playing for runs. He is playing to justify his very presence.
The unseen contest
This is why Ashwin talks of “difficult mental battles.” Samson’s journey, he says, has never been easy, and the timeline tells its own story: debut in 2014, World Cup hero in 2026, still no guarantee of a settled spot.
The numbers on the scoreboard only tell half the tale. The other half plays out in the quiet moments: when a player who has just carried a World Cup campaign wonders how one low score can undo months of work; when he watches a squad announcement and waits to see if his name survives the cut; when he hears every debate framed as Samson vs Sooryavanshi rather than India with both options thriving.
“You wonder how it’ll feel to be Sanju Samson,” Ashwin said.
That question now hangs over every selection meeting. Not as a plea for sympathy, but as a challenge: how long can a team afford to keep a World Cup match-winner living on the edge of his own career?
