2 min readMar 15, 2026 04:54 PM IST
India head coach Gautam Gambhir lavished praise on T20 World Cup Player of the Tournament Sanju Samson, revealing when he told the player he would be playing the crucial Super 8 clash vs Zimbabwe after not finding place in some of the initial games of the tournament.
“I conveyed it to him in the gym. In fact, we were both training together and I just told him that you’ll be playing against Zimbabwe, and he said, ‘let it come.’ That’s the kind of casual conversation we have. It’s not like a head coach and player’s relationship. It’s a relationship where most of our one-on-one conversations happen during practice sessions,” Gambhir said on Jio Star.
“We know what Sanju can do, there was never any doubt about his talent and explosiveness. If he gets going, he can win you the game in the first six overs,” he added.
When given a chance, Sanju exploded with 97 runs vs West Indies in a virtual quarterfinal and then brought up identical scores of 89 in the semifinal vs England as well as the final vs New Zealand.
Without Samson in the side, India’s top-order comprised of three left handers in Ishan Kishan, Abhishek Sharma and Tilak Varma.
But Gambhir asserted that the decision to bring Samson into the playing XI was not aimed at breaking the left-handed combination but at adding firepower.
“I know a lot of people will talk about how we wanted to break the three left-handers at the top, not at all. We just felt that we wanted to be more explosive because the ideology in the last one and a half years has been to go out there and be as explosive as we can be,” he said.
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“The reason to bring in Sanju was not about managing the off-spinner from the other end. It was about whether we could get even more firepower at the top and be more aggressive in the first six overs,” Gambhir added.
