After a fluctuating year, Sam Curran spoke to Wisden.com during his stint for Desert Vipers in the ILT20.
Sam Curran has been a professional cricketer for more than a decade. In that time, he’s stacked up over 100 international caps, a T20 World Cup Player of the Tournament medal to go with the winner’s trophy, and three County Championship titles which sit alongside the same number of Hundred wins. He also finished school during those years, received an MBE and two months ago he got engaged. All of that, and he still has more than two years of his 20s remaining.
“I’ve been pretty non-stop since leaving school,” Curran tells Wisden.com. “When you’re younger you just do everything that’s being thrown at you. I’m at an age now where I’ve experienced a lot of highs and a lot of lows so when you bridge those two together you can understand your game quite well.”
The last 12 months have been the most fluctuating of Curran’s high and low career. He was dropped from England’s white-ball squads at the start of the winter and, for the first time since his international debut, wasn’t even on the sidelines of any of the three squads. He’s starting 2026 on a high, however, having captained Desert Vipers to a win in the final of the ILT20, and finished the competition as its leading run-scorer. Curran played a starring role in both the Qualifier and final, whacking 38 off 12 balls as an innings finisher against MI Emirates, before hitting an unbeaten 74* in the final.
ALSO READ: How Sam Curran went from Player of the Tournament to the fringes in 18 months
Curran’s career is a tricky one to piece together. He hasn’t played a Test match since 2021 having burst onto the scene by winning player of the match in a memorable game at Edgbaston three years before. There was a sense that he was too ambiguous, not quite tall enough or quick enough to make it as a Test bowler, and not quite skilled enough with the bat to demand a place with that discipline. When Ben Stokes went down with injury against Sri Lanka in the summer of 2024, prime areas for a Curran recall, he was overlooked.
His white-ball international career is even trickier to pin down. The 2022 World Cup was the peak of his career so far. He was the point of difference bowling at the death during England’s trophy-winning campaign. But, less than 18 months later, he was once again pushed to the fringes, unable to replicate those highs outside of the specific conditions which had made them possible. Something had to change.
“We play a sport that’s pretty simple in terms of runs and wickets,” says Curran. “So I knew that I had to go and be consistent for the teams that I was playing in and I felt like I learned a lot about my game being out of the side. I worked on a few things and that was the message, to go away and score runs and take wickets. It was a nice simple message.”
It wouldn’t have been unreasonable for Curran to think his international career was on pause for some time after being left out of England’s white ball squads at the beginning of this year. Brendon McCullum had just taken charge of the white-ball set-up to go along with his Test role. McCullum’s preference for bowlers with more pace than Curran has been clear, and Curran hasn’t played a Test under McCullum’s regime. At the time, he stated publicly that he feared he no longer “fit the mould” of what England management was looking for.
Instead, Curran took the opportunity to reset and nail down a new role, one that would make him difficult for England not to pick. No longer viable as a frontline bowler, he set about reforming himself into a top five batter, with unique variations as a sixth bowler.
A lot of that work happened on the franchise routes of the winter, which have been a stable part of Curran’s life since he first burst to international attention. At a different phase in his life now, however, he looks at lucrative contracts for a few weeks work here and there in a different way.
“When you’re playing franchise cricket you meet so many different coaches,” says Curran. “But thankfully my route of franchise cricket at the moment has been with coaches who know me which is also quite important, like going to set ups where you feel valued.”
Playing for Desert Vipers in the ILT20 last year, Curran was in the top five run-scorers in the competition, scoring an unbeaten 62 in the final batting at No.5. He also captained the side in Lockie Ferguson’s absence, his first step into a leadership role of a professional side. Appointment as Surrey’s T20 captain followed a month later. As his boyhood club, The Oval is the core of Curran’s story. Ahead of last summer, he joined up with teammates turned players Gareth Batty and Jade Dernbach to fine-tune the work he’d started in the winter.
“I’ve got a lot of close people around me who know me on and off the field,” says Curran. “Surrey has been a big part of that. They’ve seen me on and off the field, when I’m not playing too well I go back to the coaches there or I go to The Oval and hit a few balls. I go back to people that know me rather than, sometimes you get so many people who are involved. Slowing down is sometimes a good thing.”
Sam Curran is having a season to remember in The Hundred 💪#SamCurran #Cricket pic.twitter.com/C4cuSlVtlY
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) August 26, 2025
Having signed off the IPL with a 47-ball 88 before returning home, Curran started the season with four wickets and 147 in Surrey’s Championship match against Essex. The next month, he hit his second first-class century, cashing in on a flat Oval track to score 108 off 117 balls. As part of a formidable Oval Invincibles lineup, he scored 238 runs from eight innings. No one in the competition scored as many runs at a higher strike-rate than him (176.29). In his most memorable knock at The Oval against Trent Rockets, the Invincibles needed 102 off 40 balls when he came to the crease. After he scored seven from his first 12 deliveries, Curran hit 36 off his next seven. By the time he was out, the equation had been reduced to 37 off 14.
“That was one of those nights where things just clicked,” said Curran. “You train for those moments, and that night me and Coxy [Jordan Cox] batted nicely.
“It’s more like your movements feel good and you feel like you’re seeing the ball really early, and when you’re hitting the ball and it’s travelling into the stands, it’s a pretty good feeling when there’s a lot of fans at The Oval.”
For all that success of the summer built off a winter’s hard work, Curran was still overlooked for England’s white-ball squads in September. It was only after Ben Duckett took an extra week of rest that Curran was added to the T20I squad. For the winter series in New Zealand, however, Curran was back in the big time, selected as part of a first-choice ODI squad and a T20 group only a few months away from a T20 World Cup. He scored an unbeaten 49* in Christchurch amid a rain-interrupted series.
The culmination of those efforts over the summer, is that Curran was named in England’s provisional squad for the T20 World Cup in February. Given the crowded nature of England’s T20 group, with the option to pack their top-order like they did against South Africa, and the option to select a spin-bowling allrounder like Will Jacks or Rehan Ahmed to fill Curran’s role on subcontinental pitches, Curran has fought through a competitive field. The role Curran plays in this World Cup will likely not be as central as his starring role in 2022, but that is out of his hands. But, as he proved over the first half of this year, everything else very much is in his control.
“I got thrown in when I was young,” says Curran. “So you just play like you would in a school game to start with. I’ve learned a lot since then and I’m a very different player to who I was back then. When you’re young you don’t really think about the game too much because it’s a dream to play for your country. Now you see a bigger picture to life on the field and off the field. I still feel like I’ve got a long way to go.”
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