India’s coach on their just-completed tour of Sri Lanka, Rahul Dravid, said wicketkeeper-batsman Sanju Samson will be a “little disappointed” with his performances in Colombo. Dravid, however, also mentioned it is important to not lose patience with players like Samson, who is undoubtedly very talented.
Samson was one of the young Indians who carried a great sense of anticipation around him heading into the limited-overs series in Sri Lanka. But as has been the case with the 26-year-old Kerala right-hand batsman, he had a series of promising but insufficient scores and struggled to overcome the long-standing issue of inconsistency.
Samson made an encouraging start to his tour with a run-a-ball 46 in the third and final ODI, but his returns dipped thereafter, with scores of just 27, 7, and 0 in the three-match T20I series that followed.
It was not the easiest pitch to bat on. In ODIs, he got a chance and scored 46. He was batting well in the first T20 but the last couple of wickets (pitches) were challenging. I guess yeah, if you look back at the series, we will be a little disappointed.
Having said that not only Sanju but a lot of young guys in this team are talented kids, and we need to be patient with them.
he told the press in a post-match interaction on Thursday.
Dravid stretched his point forward to include young guns such as Ruturaj Gaikwad and Devdutt Padikkal, who both made their T20I debuts against Sri Lanka despite still finding their feet at their domestic and IPL level and had lessons to take out of their experience in the Island nation.
Getting the chance to play the last two T20Is for a depleted Indian side that was missing multiple first-choice batters due to the COVID-19 scare in the camp, Padikkal and Gaikwad managed to collect only 38 and 35 runs, respectively, from their outings.
I am not disappointed as they are young. They are going to learn and get better only when they are exposed to these kind of conditions and quality of bowling. Sri Lankan team’s bowling attack is an international bowling attack.
Dravid said to the former India captain.
