After Sanju Samson hit an unbeaten 97 off 50 balls, a record score for India while chasing in men’s T20 World Cups, to put his side in the semi-finals, he described it as “one of the greatest days of my life.”
“I never felt that I would do something special like this but I was just focusing on my role,” Samson said after winning the Player-of-the-Match award against West Indies in Kolkata. “Just keeping one ball at a time and very grateful, I think this is one of the greatest days of my life.”
In a virtual quarter-final against West Indies at Eden Gardens, Samson stepped up and broke the previous record held by Virat Kohli, who had scored 82 against Australia in Mohali in the 2016 T20 World Cup and then matched the score against Pakistan at the MCG in the 2022 T20 World Cup. Samson said he has learnt to pace a T20 chase by closely watching the likes of Kohli and Rohit Sharma.
This was the first time in IPL and T20Is that Samson opened and stayed unbeaten in a successful chase.
“I’ve only played maybe 50-60 games, but I’ve seen around 100 games,” Samson said. “I’ve seen the greatest people finish games and how they change their game according to the game [situation]. So, [the] last game [in Chennai against Zimbabwe] we were batting first, so it was all about setting a very high score, so that’s how I wanted to go big, right from ball one. But this game was completely different, I think as soon as I wanted to go a bit higher, we were losing wickets, so I wanted to build a partnership and wanted to keep on focusing on my process.”