Two centuries in four games: how Sanju Samson has quietly answered every question about his CSK move
When Chennai Super Kings traded for Sanju Samson before IPL 2026, the reaction at Chepauk was not exactly unanimous. Rajasthan Royals had just kept their captain for five seasons running and the deal looked, from the outside, like Chennai paying top money for a 31-year-old keeper who had never quite lifted an IPL trophy on his own. When Samson then opened IPL 2026 with scores of 6, 7 and 9, the doubts landed in the open.
Twelve days on, the scoreboard is doing a lot of talking. Samson has two hundreds in his last four games for Chennai. Tonight at Wankhede he made an unbeaten 101 off 54 balls to help hammer Mumbai Indians by 103 runs, the biggest defeat in runs Mumbai have ever suffered in the IPL.
Back to hitting the ball properly
There is a version of Samson that goes missing for weeks at a time and a version that plays like the best Indian white-ball batter nobody talks about, and for the first three matches this season it was the former. He was walking into fast bowling early, looking for release shots before he had found his feet, and getting out to deliveries he would usually leave alone.
In the last four, the footwork has been cleaner and the timing has come back. The previous century, against Delhi Capitals, was the checkpoint. Tonight’s was the confirmation. Ten fours, six sixes, and the last over of the CSK innings produced 16 runs, including the single that brought up the hundred.
What Chennai’s opening combination looks like now
CSK had a problem at the top all of last season and the first half of this one. Samson moving into an opening role solves it in a way that Chennai could not have solved from within the squad. The gap between him and Ruturaj Gaikwad, who is averaging in the low teens this season, is now very large, and Chennai will have to decide soon whether that becomes a conversation.
Ravichandran Ashwin has already floated the idea that Samson is CSK’s next captain whenever Gaikwad and MS Dhoni eventually step out of the picture. That is not about to happen this season, but it says something about where Samson is viewed, both outside the CSK dressing room and within it.
Five IPL hundreds and climbing
Tonight’s was Samson’s fifth IPL century. That takes him level with KL Rahul in joint fourth on the all-time list, with Virat Kohli (eight), Jos Buttler (seven) and Chris Gayle (six) ahead. For context, Samson scored his first IPL hundred in 2017. He is a slow accumulator of these things, but he now has two in the space of four matches, and the first individual hundred by any CSK batter against Mumbai Indians in eighteen seasons.
Across all T20 cricket it pulls him level with Rohit Sharma on eight hundreds, joint third among Indian batters behind Abhishek Sharma and Kohli. Three weeks ago a list like that would not have included Samson’s name in the same paragraph.
Chennai are fifth on six points with seven games to go. Hardly a playoff team yet. But if Samson keeps opening the way he has opened the last four games, CSK will be a different proposition in May than they looked in March.
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