A video has gone viral on social media in which Samson Viswanath, father of Indian cricketer Sanju Samson, makes a shocking claim about his son's international career. In the viral rant, Viswanath accused former Indian captains MS Dhoni, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma of wasting a decade of Samson's international career. He also put the blame on former India head coach Rahul Dravid, who played Samson growing up. Samson, who recently became the first Indian to score consecutive centuries in T20Is, struggled to get regular playing time until Rohit and Virat announced their retirement from T20Is earlier this year.
“There are three to four people who have wasted 10 years of my son's crucial career… captains like Dhoni ji, Virat [Kohli] ji, Rohit [Sharma] ji and coach [Rahul] Dravid ji. These four people wasted ten years of my son's life, but the more they hurt him, the stronger Sanju emerged from the crisis,” Viswanath told Malayali news channel Media One.
Sanju Samson's father accused Dhoni, Rohit and Kohli of not picking his son in the team when he averaged 28 in List A, 35 in FC and 27 in IPL till 2020
Sanju's PR wants to hide this video from youpic.twitter.com/sYaQKoU9gu
— (@shinzohattori5) November 12, 2024
Samson was part of India's T20 World Cup-winning squad earlier this year. However, he did not play a single match after failing to impress in the warm-up games.
He was subsequently overlooked for the white-ball tour of Sri Lanka, the first series of new head coach Gautam Gambhir in charge of the team after replacing Dravid after this year's T20 World Cup.
However, Indian T20I captain Suryakumar Yadav and Gambhir have shown faith in Samson, who repaid the faith by scoring back-to-back centuries against Bangladesh and South Africa respectively.
Samson recently revealed that Suryakumar communicated about opening the batting in the next seven T20Is and gave his absolute support regardless of how the results would follow.
“While I was playing in the Duleep Trophy, Surya came to me and said, 'You have the next seven matches. You will start in these seven matches and I will support you no matter what.' For the first time in my career I got such clarity, which gave me confidence. The team management has been clear about the last few games that I will open.”
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