Having broken back into England's T20I plans just in time for another World Cup, Sam Curran is poised once again to be England's starring man, writes Ben Gardner.
Sam Curran is not, by the pure metric of average, a good T20 No.6, averaging 16 at the position in all short-form cricket. Only Carlos Brathwaite has batted there as often with a worse average. And by the pure metric of strike rate, his innings in the third T20I against Sri Lanka was not a good innings by a No.6, coming at a strike rate of 121. But then, coming in inside the powerplay is not what T20 No.6s are supposed to do. Curran realised the situation called for something different.
And so he scampered and stood firm, bade his time rather than swinging freely. He hit just one six in 48 balls. He got England up to a total they were just able to defend. This was a set of circumstances and conditions a No.6 will face very rarely in T20 cricket. And yet it also showed exactly why Curran is the right man to be England’s No.6 at the T20 World Cup.
As recently as five months ago, England and Brendon McCullum didn’t know what to do with Sam Curran. He wasn’t originally picked in their T20I squad to face South Africa, their last home series before the T20 World Cup, despite a starring role in Oval Invincibles’ third consecutive Hundred triumph. McCullum had taken a look at him at the start of his white-ball tenure, and then didn’t pick him from the start of 2025 until that late call-up in September.
View this post on Instagram
Despite his growing status as a titan of English domestic T20 cricket, and his undeniable potential as a multi-faceted cricketer, there was a cold logic to Curran’s exclusion. His bowling, even now is not seen as justifying inclusion as a front-liner, meaning if he is to play, it has to be as one of the top six. But he has shown he is not suited to being a traditional T20 finisher, and while he is a capable batter in the top five, he is not quite on the level of England’s best. Therefore, he has sat on the sidelines.
Curran, however, has often confounded cold logic and defied easy categorisation. To start with, let’s look at the fact that he has never nailed being a T20 finisher. The main requirement for this job is being a good six-hitter, and Curran is, on the face of it, a good six-hitter. He has an easy, free-flowing bat swing, and in Test cricket, his sixes per innings ratio sandwiches him between Flintoff and KP in England’s all-time top ten.
What holds him back here is that the traditional remit of the role – come in, slog, job done – fails to make use of his main virtues. Curran has always been a cricketer whose essential quality is unquantifiable. It’s not found in a match-up or a set of numbers, but in his appetite for the fight, his sense of what a moment requires, and his ability to rise to it. This has been the case ever since he first stepped into Surrey’s academy as a teenager, when he arrived with plenty of fanfare, and to begin with struggled to justify the hype. “When Sam first came over, he had this huge reputation, but for about two or three weeks on the hard indoor surface, he didn’t look anything special,” Neil Stewart, Surrey’s academy coach, recalled in 2018. “He looked like a lad who was a little bit loose and would get out, and bowl medium-pace swingers. He just looked like a good 14-year-old cricketer.”
Then Stewart put Curran into a match situation. “Suddenly you saw a completely different bloke. As soon as he was in a team against another team he ran in, bowled quick, and for those three weeks when it was competitive he never got out. You just knew he was a very high-quality player.”
It’s this strength that shines through at the end of T20 World Cups, and that can at times be dimmed on the franchise circuit. If you’re a cricketer who thrives in the games that matter most, what does that mean when most of the games you play don’t matter? It’s a similar strand of thinking that made Ben Stokes so crucial in the 2022 T20 World Cup. He was, by that point, not a T20 cricketer at the forefront of the world game. But he had also shown he could be counted on when the heat was rising. Semi-finals and finals of T20 World Cups are not like most T20 cricket matches. The bowling attacks are better. The pressure is higher. Sometimes it is about not getting out, about knuckling down, about throwing a blanket over a chip pan fire, rather than whacking a slow left-armer into the terraces. There’s no Stokes this time around, but in Curran, England have the man who most mirrors his main character energy.
Since his debut, Curran has often been at the fringes, and yet has also been at the heart of two of England’s biggest triumphs. He was Player of the Series in a 4-1 win against India in 2018, his first summer in a Test shirt, despite not scoring a hundred or taking a five-for. Instead, it was a series of contributions at the series’ hinge points that led Virat Kohli to credit Curran as the difference between the sides. That remains England’s last triumph in a five-Test rubber.
Four years later, he was at the heart of another last-of-its-kind win, Player of the Tournament as England won the T20 World Cup to become the first dual world champions in men’s cricket. Again, it was that sense of a moment that defined Curran’s campaign, always there with the answer to take a momentum-halting wicket at the death. At the time, the win seemed to confirm the continuation of England’s white-ball dominance. In hindsight, it stands as the last gasp of a soon-deflated side.
And now here we are, four years on again, Curran having fought his way back in, ready once again to be England’s star man when it matters.
Follow Wisden for all cricket updates, including live scores, match stats, quizzes and more. Stay up to date with the latest cricket news, player updates, team standings, match highlights, video analysis and live match odds.
