Preach Patience, Practice Panic: How India Failed Sooryavanshi and Samson in the UK
It was a tour that left Indian cricket with more than a few unwanted entries. After going 0-6 in the UK, the reigning T20 World Cup champions surrendered their top spot while new captain Shreyas Iyer became the first Indian skipper to go winless in his first seven T20Is. India posted their lowest T20I total in almost 20 years and conceded their highest ever total in the format. Yet the tour’s most damaging consequence cannot be measured by scorecards or statistics. Instead, it may be the crisis of confidence it has left behind in two of India’s brightest batting talents – Vaibhav Sooryavanshi and Sanju Samson.
Sooryavanshi arrived in the UK in red-hot form, fresh from a remarkable IPL season and a fruitful tour of India and Sri Lanka. Expectations were understandably high. Yet, after spending the first three games of the tour on the bench, the 15-year-old witnessed his long-awaited debut in Manchester, playing three matches and being then sent straight back to the touchline for the final T20I.
Few phrases have been repeated more often by the Indian team management than ‘give the players a long rope’.
Recent events suggest that the rope is often much shorter than advertised.
Sanju Samson knows this better than most. He was drafted in as India’s long-term wicket-keeper before the T20 World Cup, but was dropped to accommodate Shubman Gill. When this experiment unraveled, Samson returned to the XI under immense pressure and failed. Ironically, injury and circumstances gave him another opportunity during the World Cup and he responded with three decisive innings to help India lift their third T20 crown.
Months later, the rhetoric remained unchanged. When asked why Sooryavanshi did not get a debut against Ireland – an associate nation offering a milder introduction to international cricket – management again spoke of patience and timing.
However, Samson’s patience only lasted three innings. And it lasted only three innings for Vaibhav.
What will the sudden ax do to the 15-year-old who has been touted as the next generation talent in Indian cricket for the past year? Conversely, what does it do to a 30-year-old whose place for a teenager disappears, only to be restored for a dead rubber in pursuit of a world record 258 runs?
The numbers tell only part of the story.
Sooryavanshi managed 42 runs in three innings and was repeatedly trapped by the short ball bowled by Jofra Archer. The Englishman himself was quick to note that the Indian batsmen were used to flatter pitches and shorter boundaries, where mishits often took six. Whether one agrees with that assessment or not, it underscored the challenge facing a teenager making his international debut in hostile conditions.
Samson endured an even tougher tour statistically. He scored 5 and 0 against the moving ball in Ireland – exactly the kind of loose patch he often overcame with substantial innings later in the series. He managed just one run in the rain-affected opening T20I against England before losing his place. Recalled only for the final match on the flattest batting surface of the tour, he hit 27 off 14 balls in a futile chase of 258. By then the damage was done. Not just because of his numbers, but also because of the security that every batsman craves.
The whole situation could have played out differently if India had introduced Sooryavanshi against Ireland, allowing him to settle into international cricket before asking him to observe and learn during the more rigorous English leg.
Instead, management finds itself open to a much more uncomfortable question.
Did India rush Vaibhav Sooryavanshi’s debut? Or did they rush to drop him after just three games?
If the selectors really believed he was ready for international cricket, then three innings doesn’t feel close enough to make a decision. If they believed that it still required care, then the debut itself could wait. Both positions cannot coexist comfortably.
Messaging was mostly confused. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi dropped after three matches in England (Photo Reuters)
COST OF MIXED MESSAGES
Admittedly, these T20Is are of limited long-term significance as the next World Cup is still far away. Still, Indian cricket has a long history of players disappearing after bad bilateral series and never coming back. One cannot wonder if these failures will quietly resurface when Samson’s name comes up at future selection meetings.
Samson and Sooryavanshi are not isolated cases either.
Tilak Varma, promoted to vice-captain after the World Cup, inexplicably found himself batting at No. 5 or No. 6 as a finisher. It’s a role seemingly at odds with the strengths that established him – absorbing pressure, constructing innings and controlling chases.
Unless the England tour was a full-blown experiment – which it never seemed – many of these decisions are hard to explain.
But maybe that’s a discussion for another day.
The bigger concern is this: was it necessary to dent the confidence of two elite batsmen – one who had just helped India win the FIFA World Cup and the other who is widely regarded as the future of Indian cricket?
At the time when Sooryavanshi was he was reportedly given a separate dressing room because he is still a minor, India simultaneously dropped him in the deep and expected the 15-year-old to rescue a batting unit that had collapsed repeatedly during the tour.
Either the management led by Gautam Gambhir sees Sooryavanshi completely differently from everyone else or they still subscribe to the old school philosophy of throwing youngsters into the fire and hoping they come out stronger.
Maybe they will.
Samson has always been a player whose confidence and rhythm move in tandem, so the UK’s stop-start treatment has been particularly harsh. We still know too little about Sooryavanshi to predict how she will react. But one lesson was learned early in his career: talent alone does not guarantee patience.
India may yet find that the deepest scars of this disastrous tour have not remained on the scoreboard, but in the minds of two batsmen who cannot afford to lose.
– The end
Issued by:
Akshay Ramesh
Published on:
Jul 12, 2026 12:17 PM IST