aim 260 Samson's dismissals on the pull: coincidence, pattern, or problem?

When does a coincidence become a pattern, and when does a pattern become a problem? Where on that sliding scale does Sanju Samson’s series against England belong? Five innings, five dismissals to Jofra Archer, Saqib Mahmood and Mark Wood, all five times playing the pull shot: coincidence, pattern, or problem?Before we try to answer that question, it’s worth noting Gautam Gambhir’s words from Sunday night, after India had wrapped up the series 4-1 win with a brutal, 150-run win at the Wankhede Stadium. It’s worth noting them in full.“That’s the kind of T20 cricket we want to play. We don’t want to fear losing a game of cricket,” Gambhir told the host broadcaster. “We want to play high-risk, high-reward cricket. And these guys have adopted that ideology, that policy really well. And I think the ideology of this T20 team is based on selflessness and fearlessness. And I think in the last six months, these guys have done it day in, day out.Related

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“We want to try and get to 250-260 regularly. And in trying to do that, there’ll be games where we’ll get bundled out for 120-130. And that is what T20 cricket is all about. And unless and until you [play] that high-risk cricket, you won’t get those big rewards as well. Most importantly, I think we’re on the right track. Come those big tournaments, we want to still continue playing this way and we don’t want to fear losing anything.”High risk, high reward. Back in the not-too-distant past, when India hadn’t fully embraced this philosophy, Samson was often held up as a poster boy of high risk, high reward, as the kind of player the team management wasn’t showing enough faith in. Then, over the course of the last two T20I regimes, under Rahul Dravid and Rohit Sharma and then Gambhir and Suryakumar Yadav, Samson has made his way up the ranks. He was a member of India’s World-Cup-winning squad last year, and has become, since the retirements of Rohit and Virat Kohli, something of a fixture at the top of the order.Vindication came late last year with three hundreds in five innings, one against Bangladesh at home followed by two away in South Africa. Then he ran into England, and Archer and Wood.Samson ended 2024 with 111, 107, 0, 0 and 109*. He has begun 2025 with 26, 5, 3, 1 and 16.1:05

Manjrekar: Talents like Samson should be allowed a long patch of failures

Now this sort of sequence is par for the course in T20, where outcomes exhibit a high degree of variance, particularly among batters who play in a high-risk, high-reward way. Good teams understand and accept this. High risk won’t always bring high reward at an individual level, but collective reward is a likely outcome if a deep, skilful and powerful line-up embraces this approach.Enough T20 has been played, watched and analysed now for the wider commentariat to be able to understand the probablities, but much of the discourse around the format continues to exhibit a curious cognitive dissonance: we want high risk, high reward, and we think we understand the trade-offs involved, but we continue to ask batters to make consistent scores.Samson has spent most of his career battling this dissonance.If there’s a difference between earlier criticisms of Samson and what he’s facing now, it’s that his recent dismissals have all come off the same sort of shot against the same sort of ball – surely there’s an issue here.Is there, though? Samson has never previously had much of an issue with the short ball – it wasn’t that long ago that his ability to put away the short ball formed the crux of media critiques of India selecting Shreyas Iyer ahead of him. In the last three seasons of the IPL, Samson has only been dismissed four times in 55 balls while pulling or hooking fast bowlers, and his strike rate of 272.72 while playing those shots is the sixth-best among the 36 batters who have scored at least 100 runs with those shots.

We want high risk, high reward, and we think we understand the trade-offs involved, but we continue to ask batters to make consistent scores.

On the tour of South Africa in November, Samson attempted nine pulls or hooks against fast bowlers, and hit five of them for six. Those nine balls brought him 35 runs without dismissal.During the England series, those shots brought Samson four dismissals in 12 balls. High risk, high reward, high variance. And any batter who tends to pull from down to up – Rohit is the prime example – goes through periods of hitting everything for six and periods of hitting everything straight to boundary fielders.The eagle-eyed among you will have noted that it’s four dismissals rather than five, and that’s because ESPNcricinfo’s scorers recorded Samson’s dismissal in Rajkot as coming off a slog rather than a pull. It’s all subjective, but there’s a good case for applying the slog label to that shot: he had moved to the leg side to try and create room, and was aiming down the ground rather than square.Samson’s high-risk, high-reward approach has found acceptance under coach Gambhir•PTI

This tendency to aim down the ground with a flat bat has got Samson in trouble previously too, when he’s either tried to fetch the ball from well outside his eyeline or found the ball climbing higher than expected. His dismissal off Hardik Pandya in the 2022 IPL final came off a similar sort of shot. Slog or pull? Either way, it’s a shot Samson often attempts, sometimes to his detriment, showing both the level of ability and belief he has and his willingness to take on high risk.And just as a pull can sometimes be a slog, one pull isn’t necessarily the same as another. In the first two T20Is, Samson’s dismissals came when he got himself into an awkward position deep in his crease, still side-on to the ball with his hips closed-off and with little room to deal with Archer’s pace off the pitch.In the fifth T20I, Samson pulled Archer for two sixes in the first over, getting right across his stumps and past the line of the ball. Wood then dismissed him in the next over, and while Samson hadn’t taken that big step across, he had shifted his weight onto the back foot well in time to be able to swivel through the hips. He middled this pull, and might have picked up six more runs if he’d been able to place it a few yards either side of the fielder at deep-backward square leg.It wasn’t his day, though, and it wasn’t his series.It was an outlier of a series in another way too. Few attacks in the world boast the wealth of genuinely quick, hit-the-deck options that England can call upon when Archer and Wood are both fit. If there was ever an attack that could test Samson in this particular way, it was this one. He tried to come up with ways of dealing with this mode of attack as the series went on, and Mumbai suggested he may have found one.Or not – who can say? Another series against this attack may well cause Samson more discomfort. But how often is he going to face an attack like this? How often does any top-level T20 batter come up against an attack that matches up this well against their vulnerabilities? Samson’s series against England was, in all kinds of ways, the perfect storm.Five innings, then, and five dismissals to the pull (or variants thereof). This was probably more pattern than coincidence, but it’s quite a leap to suggest there’s any long-term problem here.