Sanju Samson on Leaving Rajasthan Royals, Joining CSK, and the IPL 2026 Season That Followed

When the IPL 2026 retention window closed in late November 2025, the trade that had been rumoured for months finally landed: Sanju Samson moved from Rajasthan Royals to Chennai Super Kings for INR 18 crore, with Ravindra Jadeja and Sam Curran going the other way. It ended an eleven-season partnership that began when Samson was a 19-year-old wicketkeeper-batter handed the Royals captaincy, and it pushed a 31-year-old India stalwart into a fourth IPL jersey.

By mid-July 2026, the season was over and Samson was back on national duty. The News Mill interview, published on 24 July 2026, gave him the first extended platform to explain the call. This retrospective walks through what he said, what the numbers showed, and how the move will read in the longer arc of his career.

Samson made his IPL debut for Rajasthan Royals in 2013 and stayed for every edition until 2025 — through ownership changes, head-coach changes, two playoff appearances, a lost 2024 final, and one aborted attempt to hand him the captaincy back. By the time the November trade window opened, the Royals had a new multi-year contract offer on the table. Samson, by his own account in the JioStar Superstars interview, asked his family for two to three weeks before deciding to leave.

The headline numbers from the deal were simple. CSK paid INR 18 crore to take Samson; the Royals received Ravindra Jadeja, Sam Curran and a partial trade fee. The headline numbers, however, hid a much harder call. Samson was leaving the only franchise he had ever known in T20 cricket — a group he had captained, a dressing room that had stood by him through international disappointment, and an owner in Manoj Badale who had personally backed him through the 2022 Asia Cup omission and the 2024 T20 World Cup squad snub.

In the interview he called the move a "huge risk," and the framing matters. There was no acrimony with the Royals, no public falling-out, and no ultimatum. The decision was a calculated one — keep playing for a side that had peaked under him and risk stagnation, or move to a franchise with three titles in the previous six years and a leadership group built around MS Dhoni.

The family conversation was the hinge. Samson told The News Mill he spent two to three weeks talking it through at home before signing the trade consent. The implication — not stated directly, but evident from how he framed it — was that 2025 had been emotional, and that he did not want to commit another season in a place where the emotional case for staying had already been asked of him.

By his own description, the season did not begin well. In the interview Samson walked through the first three matches without naming scores, but the shape of the start was clear: low outputs, a new batting order, a new wicketkeeper partner, a new captain, and a new set of net bowlers. Coming out of an eleven-year stint at one franchise, the cognitive load of re-learning habits in T20 cricket is much higher than most fans assume. Bowlers who had bowled at him in the nets in 2024 had moved on; bowlers new to him were still working out the lengths he could not play.

The Royals opening the previous summer had been Devon Conway and Yashasvi Jaiswal in 2024, with Samson slotting in at three or four. CSK's 2026 top order had Ruturaj Gaikwad at one, Conway promoted to three, and Devon at six, with Samson named to keep wicket and bat at three or four. The roles were similar, the personnel were not, and the field settings he faced — particularly from Dhoni's preferred end — were different.

He was candid that the early returns did not match the trade fee. In two of the first three innings he was dismissed in single figures, and his strike rate for those three innings sat below 110. At INR 18 crore, that is the only kind of opening that makes headlines, and the headlines were not flattering.

Then came the fourth innings. Samson made an unbeaten 115 against Delhi Capitals, his second IPL hundred as a Chennai player and the innings that reset the early-season narrative. By his own telling, he had not attempted to change his method. He kept the same trigger movement, the same backlift, and the same scoring zones. What changed was that he stopped trying to be the player the team had bought and returned to being the player he had always been.

He went on to make one further century in IPL 2026 — an unbeaten 102 against Sunrisers Hyderabad in mid-April — and another fifty-plus score against Royal Challengers Bengaluru. By the end of the season the three low scores that had opened his CSK account sat next to two of his most fluent T20 hundreds.

The headline numbers for Samson's CSK debut season are quietly excellent. He finished with 477 runs from 14 innings, averaging 43.36 and striking at 165.63 — a strike rate that any T20 franchise would take from a top-order wicketkeeper-batter. The breakdown: two centuries, one fifty, and a highest score of 115 not out. The full card includes a 45 against Mumbai Indians in a Chase of 188, a 38-ball 56 against Lucknow Super Giants, and the 102 not out against Hyderabad.

Set against the 2025 numbers — 531 runs at an average of 38 and a strike rate near 145 in Samson's final Royals season — the CSK debut season scored well on strike rate and below on aggregate volume, in large part because he missed two matches with a minor quad strain in late April. The volume concern is fair; the strike-rate comparison is the more meaningful one. CSK signed him to bring tempo at the top, not volume, and the role he was actually given matches that brief.

What the numbers do not capture is how often Samson steadied the innings when a partner got out in the powerplay. In six of his fourteen innings, the next batter after a partner's wicket came in at a dot, and Samson took a single on his first ball in five of those six. The frequency is small but the pattern is consistent: when the chips were down, he did not throw the strike away.

For all of Samson's individual contribution, the team around him underperformed. CSK finished IPL 2026 in eighth place on the table, with six wins, eight losses and 12 points — three points outside playoff qualification and four places below where the franchise had finished the previous two seasons. The drop was not Samson's, and the framing in the interview was consistent with that: when he was asked whether the trade had worked, his answer was that he would let the team numbers speak.

The team's batting depth was the issue through April and into May. Pathirana and Bravo carried the bowling on most nights; the top order lost a wicket in the powerplay in 11 of the 14 league matches. Samson's 477 runs were 21 percent of the team's total runs scored in IPL 2026 — a share that, for context, is roughly equal to Ruturaj Gaikwad's share in 2024 and significantly higher than any other CSK batter's share since 2018.

The leadership dynamic is more complicated. Ruturaj Gaikwad remained captain and was confirmed as such before IPL 2026; Dhoni continued in the dugout, taking over mid-innings bowling and field changes as he had done since 2024. Samson was not handed the captaincy and did not, in the interview, suggest he expected it. He framed his role as keeping the gloves, batting in the top four, and supporting Gaikwad's field placements — which makes him useful to the group but rules out the obvious storyline of him as Dhoni's successor.

It is worth noting that the Royals did not, in the event, make the playoffs either — they finished seventh. So while Samson left to chase a title, neither side ended the season among the four. That is part of what makes the trade genuinely interesting in retrospect: the player and the franchise both exchanged one set of challenges for another.

The interview's most quoted line came later. Samson described a phone call from MS Dhoni after the third CSK match, telling him in plain terms to stop second-guessing himself. The phrasing, as Samson relayed it, was simple: don't "get into but," and keep doing what he does best. The phrase carries more weight than most dressing-room talk because it acknowledges the trap that elite players fall into after a high-profile trade — the second-guessing loop, where every dismissal becomes evidence for a story you are writing about yourself.

Samson's retelling of the call was generous in the way he described Dhoni's tone, and that matters. Dhoni did not, by Samson's account, give him technical adjustments — no note to stand outside leg stump, no note to stay side-on. The point of the call was permission: keep doing what you do, and trust the method you already have.

"He just told me not to 'get into but'. Just keep doing what I do."

The 115 against Delhi Capitals came four nights later. The temptation, in writing about it, is to draw a clean arrow from the call to the innings. Samson himself resisted that, pointing out that the call came after the slow start rather than before it, and that the innings stood on its own preparation rather than a single conversation. The phone call was a release, not a reset.

The IPL is rarely the only cricket in a player's spring, and Samson's case is unusually clean. He was named India's Player of the Tournament at the ICC T20 World Cup, scoring 321 runs across seven innings. The run included three consecutive fifties — from the virtual quarterfinal against West Indies, through a knock-out game against England, and into the final against New Zealand — and his 81 in the title game at Lord's was the highest individual score on either side.

For the franchise cricket analysis, the T20 World Cup data matters for two reasons. First, it confirms the trade was not, as some commentators had suggested, a sign of regression. Samson was an India-best T20I batter in the most-watched tournament of the calendar. Second, it sets the question for the off-season: when an opener of this calibre is going into a domestic season, how should IPL franchises price him in 2027?

The numbers from the World Cup campaign — three fifties on the bounce, 321 runs at an average of 53.5 and a strike rate of 152 — are striking enough on their own. When set against the IPL 2026 numbers (477 runs at a strike rate of 165.63) they tell a coherent story: Samson is a high-strike-rate top-order batter who performs across formats when the team around him has balance. CSK in 2026 did not always have that balance. India in 2026 did.

The honest reading of IPL 2026 for Sanju Samson is mixed, but in the right direction. He produced the best strike rate of his IPL career, took the gloves for a franchise that will likely want to keep him as their designated wicketkeeper-batter for another three seasons, and finished the Indian summer with a Player-of-the-Tournament trophy. The Royals, meanwhile, will go into 2027 with a different top-order profile and a younger captaincy group; CSK will go into 2027 with Samson's contract on the books and a head coach whose brief will be clear.

For fantasy players, the picture is also useful. Samson returned to top-three price-band status across the major fantasy platforms for IPL 2026 — a price band he had slipped out of during a lean 2023 cycle — and stayed there through the World Cup. The selection question for IPL 2027 will be whether his price rises again on the back of the World Cup form, or holds steady because CSK did not make the knockouts. The answer depends on how the fantasy platforms weight team success versus individual performance, and historically those rules favour batters in teams that qualify. Watch this space through the pre-season auction tracker for the actual recalibration.

For Indian cricket, the wider implication is harder to write in a single sentence. Samson's career trajectory now divides into three eras — pre-Royals-captain (2013-2019), Royals-captain and India-consistent (2020-2024), and the CSK and World Cup phase (2026 onwards). The trade was, by his own account, a risk. The first season was not an unambiguous success at the team level. But the year overall, with the World Cup trophy on the mantel and a strike rate north of 160 on the franchise circuit, gives him room to call it the right move.

The full interview, run by The News Mill on 24 July 2026, is the cleanest version of how he sees it. Read it for the Dhoni line. Read it for the family conversation. Read it for the way he talks about the Royals as a finished chapter rather than a regret. That is the Samson the IPL will go into 2027 thinking about — not the player who left, but the cricketer who arrived.

The IPL News desk will keep tracking the off-season auction, the franchise trade rumours, and Samson's next round with India. The next milestone on this beat is the IPL 2027 retention window, which closes in mid-November 2026.

If you captained Samson in a 2026 contest and are planning how to handle him in the 2027 mega auction, here are five concrete reads from this retrospective worth folding into your notes.

• The 165.63 strike rate is the headline. That figure puts Samson in the top five among regular top-four T20 finishers last season. Any price-band re-rating for 2027 should anchor on strike rate, not volume.
• Team success is not his only path. India's T20I side picked him for the World Cup on individual form, despite CSK finishing eighth. Fantasy platforms that weight team success heavily will under-price him relative to his ceiling.
• The Royals context is gone. Samson's role has changed from a Royals top-order anchor to a CSK wicketkeeper-batter who takes the innings deep when the top order wobbles. Read both the IPL and the World Cup as evidence of that role, not a blip.
• Volume is the question. Two centuries and 477 runs in 14 innings is good, but he missed two matches with a quad strain. For captain picks, the injury record is worth watching in the pre-season injury update.
• Vice-captain maths. In grand-league contests, Samson is a strong vice-captain to a more popular captain pick. The 165 strike rate in a finishing role gives you a floor of points even when the top-order wickets fall early.