In his last six competitive games, Sanju Samson has scored three hundreds, including one in the Duleep Trophy, and the inform India wicketkeeper batter is looking to make hay while the sun shines.
Samson's 107 off 50 balls against South Africa, his second T20I hundred in as many matches after his 111 against Bangladesh last month, has helped him to partially brush off the tag of an underperformer.
"Really enjoyed my time out there in the middle. I made maximum utilisation of my current form you can say," Samson said after collecting his player of the match award following India's 61-run win over South Africa in the first T20I.
Asked about the team's gameplan, the Rajasthan Royals skipper spoke about intent.
"The intent, we have been talking about being aggressive and keeping the team ahead of yourselves. Once you play three-four balls you are looking for the boundary," said Samson.
He knows that he plays a 'high risk high reward game." "I'm not thinking much, sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn't. I am happy it worked out well today." Even Samson's skipper Suryakumar Yadav spoke glowingly about the work put in by the player all through the last decade.
"The amount of hard work he has done in the last 10 years, doing the boring work, he is eating the fruits of that. He was in the 90s but still he was looking for a boundary, playing for the team and shows the character of the man and that's what we look for," Suryakumar said.
Sanju: The Real Samson
On a breezy Durban evening with crosswinds blowing across the Kingsmead, Sanju showed Samson-like strength apart from silken grace that one can associate with Rohit Sharma's halcyon days.
There were pulled sixes off short balls from leg-spinner Nqabyomzi Peter and to length deliveries from pacers, he made room and tonked them down the ground.
The clarity in his shot selection and how cleverly he was always one up on South Africans in terms of using their field placings to his advantage spoke volumes of his improvement as a batter in recent times. The best part about Samson is his new-found consistency and finding his mojo as an opener in the shortest format.