“Lovely to meet you.” – Sanju Samson to Shaun Pollock.
Telford Vice / Cape Town
SANJU Samson snoozed at the non-striker’s end; on his heels, understandably so having faced 109 balls in the 35-degree furnace Paarl was during most of the third and deciding men’s ODI on Thursday. Just then the far fresher Keshav Maharaj darted past Samson and towards Rinku Singh, who made glancing contact with a reverse sweep to short third and set off for the single.
Calling Mr Samson … calling Mr Samson … kindly get a move on. Happily, he did. But he needed a full-length dive to make his ground. He rose with a smile. Perhaps he could see the humour in the rude truth that being 99 not out had not failed to save him from having to peel himself off the pitch. Intriguingly, given the wholehearted nature of that desperate effort to reach safety, not a smidgen of soil besmirched his shirt.
Samson dinked Maharaj’s next delivery, the last of the 44th, to long-off. More than eight years after he made his India debut — in a T20I against Zimbabwe in Harare — Samson had his first century. India have played 60 ODIs from Samson’s first, against Sri Lanka in Colombo in July 2021. Thursday’s was his 16th, and his 14th innings in the format.
If you have ambitions to nail down a job batting for India, it doesn’t help if you score consecutive half-centuries only twice in your 119 list A innings. It also doesn’t help if someone called Virat Kohli makes the big time ahead of you, and takes his chance so well the fact that you are six years younger doesn’t matter. Welcome to Samson’s reality.
He wasn’t required to bat in India’s steamroll to victory at the Wanderers on Sunday. At St George’s Park on Tuesday, when he made 12 off 23, his prod at Beuran Hendricks clattered off the edge of his bat onto the stumps. These things happen. But when you’re 29 and you’ve played 16 of 60 ODIs in the Kohli era, they matter more than they might have in other circumstances. And not in a good way.
Still, batting on a paceless pitch from the fifth over until the 46th to score a 114-ball 108 and shape an innings that looked like veering into the weeds before it reached 296/8 will take you places. Accordingly, there Samson was on screen between innings, being interviewed by Shaun Pollock. How did it all feel? “It feels …” Samson said, and paused to afford himself the luxury of thinking about the rest of his answer “… really interesting. I’m going through it in my mind now. It was emotional.”
With that the picture cut away from the scene, but the audio remained live. “Lovely to meet you,” Samson said to Pollock off camera. “It’s the first time I’m meeting you, and my father …” The rest of the exchange was lost in television’s obsession with refusing to tell a story properly. Even so, we had a tangent to follow. Samson’s second name is Viswanath, which has nothing to do with GR Viswanath. It’s the first name of his father, a former Delhi policeman who represented the city as a footballer in the Santhosh Trophy, and who is the driving force behind the player Samson junior has become.
The moment was a reminder of the times. Pollock played his last serious match — a T20 semifinal for Durham against Middlesex in Southampton in July 2008 — more than three years before Samson played his first — also a T20, in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy for Kerala against Hyderabad in Chennai in October 2011.
Maybe a more accurate scale for measuring this chasm of difference is the IPL. Samson has played 152 games in the tournament from April 2013 to May this year. Pollock played 13, all of them in 2008. The salience is that cricket has moved so far from what it was by the end of Pollock’s career that, even though he has retained a certain wrinkled boyishness at the age of 50, someone just 21 years his junior regards him with the reverence reserved for a relic.
“This format, batting at the top of the order, gives you 10 or 20 extra balls to figure it out,” Samson said after the match, a valid perspective given that he has played exactly twice as many senior T20s as list A matches. The real relics should look away now: his 58 first-class matches comprise 13.12% of his total number of senior games. Behold, the future.
South Africa’s reply was 161/3 in the 30th before the Indians — led by Arshdeep Singh’s 4/30 — took 7/57 to win an increasingly noisy contest by 78 runs. “There were some loud appeals, because on pitches like this, where nothing is happening, you need support from the umpires,” Arshdeep said.
Tony de Zorzi followed his unbeaten 119 at St George’s Park on Tuesday with an 87-ball 81, but the home side’s next best effort was Aiden Markram’s 36. De Zorzi shared 59 off 52 with Reeza Hendricks and 65 off 67 with Markram. None of South Africa’s other partnerships breached 20. Markram rued what might have been: “We were good in small patches, but we couldn’t stretch those small patches out.”
De Zorzi was trapped in front by a yorker from Arshdeep started to start South Africa’s slide to defeat, a drama that needed DRS’ intervention after the bowler had sent up a plaintive, “Out dena banta hai, yaar!” [That deserves to be given out!]. Had that not happened the result may well have been different.
Like Samson, De Zorzi has not had as many opportunities as others. On the evidence of the past three days both deserve all the chances they may yet get.
Cricbuzz
Bulletproof Truth 