All roads led to the Cup: Samson, Sharma and Kishan were at different junctures of their career coming into the T20WC

Ishan Kishan took a screenshot when his phone flashed that Suryakumar Yadav was calling. “World Cup jeetayega? Was the question, and pat came the reply: “Bharosa kharoge?”

There’s nothing artificial about this exchange. It is not one between a nervous, tentative player looking for a gig talking to a captain who had all the power.

It was an exchange between two cricket nuts united by one goal. To make this Indian team better, and hopefully sufficiently so that they would carry the day and win a World Cup at home.


It cannot have been an easy one. Ishan had just come back into the mix after two years in the wilderness. And when he dropped off the radar from the Indian team, it was not merely for fitness reasons or loss of form. There was a belief that Ishan was difficult to deal with, and that he perhaps did not value playing the game enough.

When he went back down to the basics and fought his way back into the team, Ishan also learned about himself. And so, when the runs came back, they were flowing from the blade of a man who knew his role in the team. The innings he constructed, thinking only of the team and not of how he may hold his place in it, came from a place of security and belief in himself.

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“No matter how bad your time is, you have to firstly trust yourself,” Kishan said when asked about what it was like to return from struggle. “If you’re doubting yourself, then you can’t express yourself on the field. But I also feel that when you’re working hard and helping others during their bad times, then it all comes back to you as well at a later time.

“When I had to go back to the domestic set-up, I did focus on myself but I decided that we need to move forward as a team since success is not for an individual in a team sport. Embracing the team environment in domestic cricket and later again with the national team taught me that you can pick up the good, small habits from your team-mates.”

Abhishek Sharma had three ducks and one non-appearance in India’s first four games of the World Cup. He came into the tournament as the player to watch, not from an Indian perspective but globally as a batsman who would do what few others could. This was the final version of the prototype of the modern Twenty20 batsman. And suddenly he could not buy a run. It reached a point where every opposing team would bring on an offspinner early to Abhishek, almost taunting him. It was not that he could not play that brand of bowling, but the thought had been put in his head. It affected not just him but the team.



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Come the final, even seasoned commentators and cricket watchers had reached a point where they wanted him removed, even though India had won with this combination in play. And then he repays the faith with an 18-ball 50. “When I was not making runs, everyone in the team was wanting me to get among the runs again,” Abhishek said after scoring the tournament’s fastest fifty. “In that sense, the company around you matters a lot. When I wasn’t able to contribute, everyone was saying ‘you’ll do it.’ I was struggling with self-doubt, but it was the players, coaches and support staff that had belief in me.”

Sanju Samson had his own mini-series going on. While coaching staff may now insist that he was always in the fray, always a part of strategy and that what he needed at the start of the World Cup was a break, it was the lack of runs that cost him his place in the eleven.

But, in every career, you need the stars to align and the time to be right, no matter how hard you work. In Samson’s case, Abhishek’s horror run of form and Rinku Singh’s very unfortunate temporary unavailability played their part.

But Samson did not respond by trying to cement his place in the eleven. He went wholly in the other direction, looking to score the most runs off every ball possible. Unbeaten on 97 in one game he could have been forgiven for looking for a hundred when he was on 89 in the next, but he went on the attack and perished. And again, in the third opportunity he got, once more on 89.

This was proof positive that the players in this team, through their individual journeys had reached the same place at the same time. They were playing now with fearlessness, not recklessness, they were attacking with a bigger goal in mind, not just to express themselves.

Surya may not have made many runs in the tournament, but he has been the glue that brought this team together over the course of two years, culminating in this win. And Gautam Gambhir was the enforcer-enabler that made this happen.