3 min readMay 11, 2026 07:46 PM IST
Sanju Samson, who played three successive match-winning knocks in the T20 World Cup triumph to walk away with Man of the tournament award has admitted that the days leading up to the event he had let the weight of expectations get the better of him.
Samson, who was India’s first-choice opener since the completion of the 2024 T20 World Cup, ended up losing his spot closer to the 2026 edition to Ishan Kishan. Though he did play the game against Namibia in Delhi because Abhishek Sharma was ill, Samson went back to warming the bench before making a comeback to the XI in the Super 8 fixture at Chennai in Zimbabwe. Post that match, he scored an unbeaten 97 vs West Indies and followed it up with 89 off 42 vs England in the semifinals and another 89 in the final against New Zealand at Ahmedabad.
Speaking off the bilateral series against New Zealand where he struggled to own the spot and ended up losing to Ishan, Samson revealed how it all unfolded.
“You set a goal, you set a standard as you all also might have done,” Samson told Abhinav Mukund in CSK podcast. “So when we reach very close to that dream, so you get a bit excited, you get a bit like you get out of your normal skin. That’s what I felt like New Zealand. I was very calm, relaxed. South Africa, I played one game, I scored my runs and I know what to do. I’ve done this for so many years. But something inside me was telling me the dream is very close, ‘Okay, you have to push hard now. Now this is the time. Now you have to do something special. This is the moment you have been waiting for so many years. So let’s do something special’. So that special took me out of my normal Sanju Samson,” the opener added.
Samson revealed that the weight of expectation from with in was so huge that he didn’t know how to come out of pressure and rather just deal with it. “I just felt ‘okay, I need to push a bit more extra hard to do well in the New Zealand series and then mark my place in the World Cup squad’. So that actually made me a bit desperate. It’s like I was batting for two-three hours a day and I was doing morning, evening, afternoon sessions like you must have also felt it like we put in so much effort and then expectations also went a bit high. So I felt that expectations went a bit too high but after I got out two games I was under too much pressure. I never felt that kind of pressure ever in my life. I just went through it I couldn’t get out of it to be honest.
