The Oddsworth Smell Test
Claim
“Sanju Samson is more inconsistent than other players in T20Is.”
Smells right
Data Samson's scores swing more around his average than any of 98 men's T20I batters with 40+ innings since 2015; 40% of his innings end under 10 against a 33% median.
Watch Samson bat for long enough and the pattern sets in: a run of scores that barely trouble the scorer, then one innings that carries a match on its own. Among batters with 40 or more innings in men's T20Is for full-member sides since 2015, his scores swing around his average with a spread of 1.23, a shade ahead of Mushfiqur Rahim's 1.2. Phil Salt and Glenn Maxwell, two batters nobody would call steady, come in below him on the same list, so the company he keeps is the game's most harum-scarum hitters.
The failures
Low scores are the other test of inconsistency, and here Samson looks less of an outlier. He is 17th on the list of batters whose innings end under 10 most often, with Mushfiqur at the top on 51% of his innings.
His average of 24.9 runs an innings runs close to Maxwell's 26, well clear of the scratchy end where Mushfiqur and Rachin Ravindra live.
What it means for India
This is the trade-off a selector buys with Samson. Only 24% of his innings reach 30 against a median of 30%, so the middling score that steadies an innings comes less often from him than from most. Paradoxically, Mushfiqur fails more often still and reaches 30 in just 13% of his innings, yet his scores swing a touch less around his average.
The claim holds. India have a batter whose good days win matches and whose quiet days arrive sooner than most, which means his place in the side rests on the selectors wanting those match-winning days enough to live with the quiet ones.