‘The ball left the bat unlike anyone else’

What I came to understand over years of working with him is that a backlift isn’t just a technical choice. It’s DNA. It’s linked to something called depth perception — how you perceive an object coming towards you, and how your body automatically moves the bat in response. That movement, that precise place your bat travels to, is set from childhood. You can try to change it for the rest of your career; you won’t. It’s uniquely yours.

Sanju Samson in action. (AP photo)

Sanju’s DNA was that beautiful, tall, long backlift — the kind shared by some of the greatest players the game has ever seen. As a coach, your one job when you find something like that is to preserve it. To make sure nobody — including the player himself — tampers with it.

But here’s the thing about coaching that people don’t always understand: it’s as much about building a man as it is about building a batsman. Technique and temperament are intertwined. You can’t separate how someone scores runs from who they are as a person.

And who Sanju is as a person is something quite extraordinary.

He was an ardent learner from the start — hungry, eager, attentive. He understood right and wrong early, and he held onto his values tightly even as the pressures of professional cricket mounted. But his journey was anything but linear. The competition within Indian cricket is ferocious; there are so many gifted players chasing so few spots. Sanju’s entry into the highest level came late. His success came later still.

What kept him going, I believe, was a very particular kind of mental strength — one built not on ambition, but on acceptance. He has spoken many times about how his anchor has always been the belief that all you can do is put in your very best work; everything beyond that lies outside your control. Of course it was frustrating. Of course there were moments of deep disappointment. But he never let bitterness take root. He kept working.

I see strong parallels with Rohit Sharma. Rohit was also considered a huge talent who wasn’t fulfilling his potential for years — until he got his opening slot and the rest, as they say, is history. What happens in these situations, I think, is that you reach a point where you simply strip everything back. You take out the baggage, the noise, the accumulated weight of expectation, and you reduce the whole thing to its simplest, most honest truth: the love of playing, the love of hitting a ball. Sanju reached that point. And once he did, you saw what was always there.

There’s something else about him that I think explains why people are so drawn to him — something beyond the cricket.

He is deeply, genuinely humble. He is deeply religious, deeply spiritual. And these aren’t just traits he wears publicly; they shape everything about how he moves through the world. His father runs a church back in Kerala, and Sanju is personally involved in its work — not as a figurehead, but as someone who shows up and cares. Building houses for people in need. Supporting children’s education. Giving back to his local community in ways he has never sought publicity for, and never will.

He doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t want credit. I remember him being far more concerned about whether some houses being built for families in his church were properly constructed than about any innings he’d played. That is who he actually is.

And what I’ve noticed over a long time in cricket is that who you are eventually shows in how you play. When Sanju bats, there is a clean, honest quality to it — a kind of purity that is very rare. It comes from somewhere real. The bat swing is beautiful, yes, but it’s also completely genuine — there’s nothing manufactured about it.

Of course, that same quality has sometimes worked against him. Sport, at its most competitive, demands a certain selfishness. An inward focus. A willingness to put yourself first. These things don’t come naturally to Sanju. He is, by instinct, all about other people’s comfort — which makes him a remarkable leader, but which also created friction in those periods when the cricket demanded something harder from him.

That tension — between who you are as a person and what the arena requires of you — is one of the most difficult balances in sport. Sanju has been navigating it his whole career.

The preparation he brings to his batting is exhaustive in a way that often goes unseen.

High variability practice — that’s the phrase I’d use. Multiple surfaces, multiple bowlers, sidearms, different types of deliveries, different balls, different bats. The idea is to make sure that when you walk out to bat in a high-pressure situation, there is no ball that can come at you that you haven’t already faced in practice. You’ve already been there. You’ve already solved it.

Which means that the mental job, when the moment comes, is not to rise to the occasion. That language — rising to the occasion — is actually the wrong way to think about it. We always said: go down to the level of your practice. Not up to some imagined peak. Down to what you’ve already done, thousands of times. The practice is the peak. The game is just execution.

And when Sanju executes — when everything aligns — what you see is not just a batsman hitting a ball. The ball doesn’t leave the bat the way it does for most people. It leaves it the way it does for Sachin Tendulkar, for Rohit Sharma, for Brian Lara. A sound, and then the ball is gone.

Fifteen years of hard work. A gift that was always there. And a person, honestly, who deserved his moment.

Zubin Bharucha is the childhood coach of Sanju Samson. He spoke to Tanishq Vaddi