Samson was Player of the Tournament at the World Cup, and he is back in India’s XI with the gloves

Dinesh Karthik asked the question on the morning of the first T20I in Delhi. “What is the batting order going to look like? Where does Vaibhav Suryavanshi stand, and what about Sanju Samson? How are you going to fit him in? He was such an important player in the World Cup and was dropped midway through that England series. Where does he stand?”

India answered part of it at the toss. Samson is in the XI, and he has the gloves. Suryavanshi is not playing. Jasprit Bumrah is back. Shreyas Iyer won the toss and put Afghanistan in at the Arun Jaitley Stadium.

So Samson is picked, and he is picked as the keeper again. That is the part worth sitting with.

What he did at the World Cup

Samson finished the T20 World Cup as the third highest run-scorer with 321 runs from five innings, at an average of 80.25 and a strike rate of 199.37. He was Player of the Tournament.

The three innings people remember are 97 not out from 50 balls against West Indies in a game India had to win, 89 from 42 against England in the semi-final, and 89 from 46 against New Zealand in the final. Three knockout-weight innings in a row, all of them at close to two runs a ball.

That is not a hot streak. That is a player deciding a tournament.

What happened after

He was dropped from the XI midway through the England series. He was then left out of the squad altogether for the Zimbabwe tour. When India named their ODI squad for this Afghanistan series, Kishan was picked and Samson was not.

There is a cricketing case behind it, and it is thin but real. Samson’s last four T20Is brought 27, 1, 0 and 5. Four failures in a row is four failures in a row, and India were rebuilding a batting order at the time.

The case against dropping him is that he made 477 runs in 14 IPL matches this year at a strike rate of 165.62, which is not the output of a player who has forgotten how to bat. It is the output of a player who had a bad fortnight in international cricket after having the best month of his career.

The question Karthik is actually asking

Karthik’s phrasing matters. He did not ask whether Samson is good enough. He asked how you fit him in, which is a different problem and a harder one.

Abhishek Sharma is an opener India are not dropping. Suryavanshi is the one they are building towards, and he missed out tonight. Tilak Varma is the vice-captain. Iyer is the captain. Kishan is in the XI as a specialist batter tonight, not a keeper. Count those names and it is Kishan, not Samson, left competing for a place in the middle order.

My read is that the keeping is the whole thing. Samson’s route into this side was always as the wicketkeeper who batted at the top, and it was losing the gloves to Kishan through the England series and the Zimbabwe omission that turned him into a specialist batter competing for a slot against people who are younger and cheaper to persist with. Handing him the gloves back tonight resolves that, at least for this series. It does not erase the four failures in a row that got him here.

He could score 70 in Delhi and it would still leave the bigger question open, because the question was never really about whether he can bat. It is about whether India stick with him as first-choice keeper once Kishan is fully fit and back in form. India have three T20Is against Afghanistan to show how firm tonight’s answer actually is.

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