Sanju Samson Says staying away from mobile phone and social media helped focus his career

“It was a bit of a difficult chase. Looking at our batting power, I felt that chasing 190-odd at Eden Gardens, when dew comes in, gets a bit easier, but losing wickets at regular intervals made it challenging. To be honest, that is where my experience and my role played a big part,” said Sanju Samson on his match-winning knock at Kolkata against West Indies which helped India make it to the semifinal of the T-20 World Cup.

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“I got a good start, but when the wickets kept falling, I felt I needed to finish the game and take it till the last moment. Normally you feel like doing it, but it does not happen all the time, so I am very grateful it happened in this game,” Sanju Samson said while speaking on JioHotstar’s ‘Haier Match Centre Live’

When you are batting first, you want to set up a big score and hit a lot of sixes, but when you are chasing a score like this in a pressure game, you take different options and play more boundaries rather than looking at risky options. The ball was coming on nicely, they were bowling with good pace, so I kept timing it and it came well,” the India star opener said.

“Our human nature is that we often start with a negative thought like, ‘Can I do it? I do not think I can.’ When I have that thought, I try to change it into a very positive one. When I had a series like New Zealand where I wanted to perform and be part of the World Cup team, things did not work out well, but luckily I got a 10-day gap,” Samson said.

“I did not play any games and was not in the side. I kept thinking, ‘Sanju, what else? Why did it not work? What else should I do?’ So I did some soul-searching. I worked on my base, how I set myself up, and came back to it,” the India opener said.

“A lot of people had suggestions and I saw many valid points, but at the same time I felt, ‘Sanju, you have scored three international hundreds with the same setup.’ Shot selection was something I kept working on. I did not want to change too much because I knew I had performed with the same setup, so I kept believing in myself, switched off my phone, stayed away from social media and listened to myself. I am very happy it happened in a very special game,” he said.

On what the Kolkata knock meant for him, Sanju Samson said: “More than a hundred cricketers in India dream about a day like this. I dared to dream. A young man from Trivandrum, Kerala, dreaming about playing for the country and winning a game in such a crucial match. I dared to dream and it happened.”