Sanju Samson of India (PTI Photo) Sanju Samson’s much-awaited return to his home ground offered little relief from a difficult run with the bat. Playing in front of a home crowd in Thiruvananthapuram on Saturday, the Kerala batsman endured another slender game to record his fifth consecutive failure in the T20I series against New Zealand. Samson’s matches followed a familiar script. Attempting to max out across the line, he could only manage a strong outside edge that carried safely to the fielder at deep third fielder. When he was dismissed for six, his series total ended at just 46 runs from five innings, the lowest total by an Indian opener in a five-match T20I series. That figure eclipsed his own unwanted record from exactly a year ago, when he scored 51 runs in five matches against England, thwarted repeatedly by the short ball.
Suryakumar Yadav Press Conference: On Ishan vs Sanju injury, Tilak Varma and Washington Sundar
Former India opener Aakash Chopra has expressed concern over what he described as a recurring technical issue, calling the dismissal pattern unusual at the international level. “I think it’s twice in 12 months now. It all started with that England series. You very rarely get a top-class batsman who has established a pattern, especially in the shortest format of the game. He’s been dismissed the same way five times – the short ball caught in the deep. Also here, if you see his dismissals versus pace, there’s a scary pattern,” Chopracric said during a discussion on ESPN. Chopra went on to analyze Samson’s setup in detail. “You go deep into the crease before the ball is bowled. You try to play the ball but the front foot is going nowhere. The result is that the bat actually closes every time you bowl. Once in Thiruvananthapuram he was lucky with an outside edge. In the previous game he closed the bat a bit too early again, so the pattern has formed again,” he noted. Samson’s position looks ever more precarious, especially with India’s off-spinner Ishan Kishan enjoying a prolific streak. Kishan capped his run with a scintillating maiden T20I century on Saturday night to take India to their second-highest total in the format just six days before the World Cup begins in Mumbai.
