No frenzy, no panic, no wild, reckless swing,
Just placement and timing and iron-clad will,
Each boundary a statement, each single a sting,
A strike rate of 194, breathtaking still.
The target crept closer with every brave stroke,
A four, then a six, and the crowd found its roar,
The silence of doubt into thunder he broke,
And India marched home to a glorious score.
Gone were the doubts that had Samson forlorn,
And Eden witnessed the legend of Sanju being born.
History loves Kolkata’s Eden Gardens. It likes to be written on its haloed greens. It yearns to be witnessed from its noisy stands. And no cricket match here is just a game-it is almost always a legend.
India vs West Indies: Scorecard | Highlights
Sunday (March 1) was destined to be an ode to Sanju Samson. The ground was ready. India needed to beat West Indies in what was effectively a quarter-final of the T20 World Cup. The target, 196, was a mountain. India had never climbed more than 173 in a T20 World Cup.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. But that man was never expected to be Samson.
SUCH A LONG JOURNEY
Samson made his T20I debut in 2015, a 20-year-old from Kerala with soft hands, a still head, and a gift for the outrageous stroke. Eleven years later, he had played only 59 T20Is. Fifty-nine. The number sits uncomfortably beside his talent, like a biography with half its chapters torn out.
He was repeatedly set aside. Sometimes to accommodate others. Sometimes because of his own failures. He was cast as a reserve in a squad that always had someone else ahead of him, a name on the fringes of selection meetings. He was a player perpetually described as gifted, as if the gift was a curse, a prophecy standing between him and his destiny.
He entered this World Cup squad as the first-choice opener. Then two things happened: failure and Ishan Kishan. Soon he was the back-up opener, thrust into the XI only because oppositions had begun targeting India’s left-hander heavy batting line-up with offspinners. Even his opportunity arrived through the back door. And yet, when the door opened, Samson walked through it as though he had always known it would.
THE LEGEND OF EDEN
There is something about the Eden Gardens that defies logic. On this ground, failure often begins with a celebration—almost like a cruel joke. And legends almost always begin with a doubt.
Ask VVS Laxman. In 2001, Steve Waugh’s Australia arrived at Eden Gardens having won 16 consecutive Tests, a juggernaut that seemed unstoppable. India followed on. The match looked dead. The celebrations in the Australian dressing room had already begun in spirit. And then Laxman walked out and played 281 runs worth of the most beautiful cricket the game has ever seen. Eden Gardens had looked like the site of a surrender. It became the site of a resurrection.
And ask Vinod Kambli. Perhaps Eden’s cruelest story. In the 1996 World Cup semi-final, India were chasing a modest target against Sri Lanka. Sachin Tendulkar was standing in the middle like a pillar. Then the pitch, the match and the crowd turned. Bottles rained onto the outfield. Fires were lit in the stands. The match was abandoned, awarded to Sri Lanka. Kambli walked off the field in tears, inconsolable, his jersey a canvas for his grief.
And so, when Sanju Samson walked out to bat on Sunday evening, he walked into all of that history. Into all of that weight.
THE BATTER WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD
The thing about Sunday’s match is this: Samson walked out calm and unhurried, as though the weight of the occasion had not registered. Those who have watched him across the years through the dazzling IPL seasons with Rajasthan Royals, through the cruel stretches on the sidelines, through the fleeting international appearances that promised so much and were then snatched away knew that this composure was different. It was the serenity of a man who had made peace with uncertainty, who had learned to exist in the present because the present is all he was truly given that evening.
Then wickets fell. Abhishek Sharma, caught at third man in the third over. Ishan Kishan, gone for 10 shortly after. India wobbled and the mountain looked steeper than ever. In the stands, anxiety crept in. On the field, Sanju Samson did not flinch.
“As soon as I wanted to go a bit higher, we were losing wickets,” he explained later, “so I wanted to build a partnership and wanted to keep on focusing on my process.”
That word, process, gets used so often in modern cricket that it risks becoming hollow. But watching Samson bat on Sunday evening was to understand what it actually means. It means trusting your preparation over your panic. It means reading the game situation over reading the scoreboard. It means knowing, as Samson clearly knew from all those hours of study and all those years of waiting, that T20 cricket rewards patience just as richly as it rewards aggression. It means knowing that at the Eden Gardens legends rise from the ashes.
THE MAKING OF A LEGEND
Partnership by partnership, he rebuilt the innings. With Suryakumar Yadav, he added 58 before SKY fell for 18. With Tilak Varma, he stitched together another 42. With Hardik Pandya, 38 more. Through it all, Samson was constant, accumulating, accelerating at exactly the right moments, placing the ball with a precision that had the commentators reaching for superlatives and the Eden crowd reaching for their voices.
At 50, he put his head down, took a fresh guard. At 80, he looked like a man on a mission to bat forever. Twelve fours. Four sixes. A strike rate of 194. And through it all, not once did he look like getting out.
When he flicked the first ball of the 20th over for a mighty six, Samson’s struggle found his purpose. When the ball disappeared into the stands, all those years of Samson’s journey became a blur. He had lived “one of the greatest” days of his life.
THE GREATEST DAY
What will this win mean to Samson? “I’ve kept on doubting myself,” he admitted at the post-match press conference, the Player-of-the-Match award sitting beside him. “Kept on thinking what if? Can I make it?”
There is something quietly extraordinary about that confession. And not the doubt itself, which is universal. What is extraordinary is the fact that it coexisted with an unbreakable persistence. But he kept working. Kept preparing. Kept watching. “I’ve seen around 100 games,” he said. “I’ve seen the greatest people finish games and how they change their game according to the game situation.” The student had been studying even when the classroom door was shut to him.
The record he broke in the process deserves its moment. Virat Kohli, perhaps the greatest white-ball batter India has ever produced, had twice scored 82 not out while chasing in T20 World Cups, once against Australia in Mohali in 2016 in one of the most celebrated innings ever played under pressure, and once against Pakistan at the MCG in 2022 in a match that stopped a nation. Samson surpassed both. He finished on 97 not out, the highest score by an Indian batter while chasing in men’s T20 World Cup history. That this record was set at Eden Gardens, on a ground that has hosted more than its share of great innings, felt entirely appropriate.
One of the greatest days. Not the greatest innings, not the record, not the match, but a day. A day that represented something larger than cricket.
History loves Kolkata’s Eden Gardens. On Sunday evening, it found exactly the story it was looking for. Under the lights, witnessed by the stars and the moon, Samson became a metaphor for life’s greatest lesson: one day it works out.
Sandipan Sharma, our guest author, likes to write on cricket, cinema, music and politics. He believes they are interconnected.
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