Veteran England player Jos Buttler has returned from injury exactly five months ago. On a “gut call”, Buttler gave the ball to Will Jacks to bowl the second over of England’s World Cup match against Australia. However, Travis Head and David Warner took Jacks on and hit him over the park. Twenty-two runs came off the over which Australia won by 36.
“It was probably hotter than we gave it credit for,” then head coach Matthew Mott said at the time. “And fair play to the sun, by the way, what a player he is.
However, Jos Buttler stated that he feared getting the chop after England’s consecutive World Cup failures.
“I thought it was a possibility, absolutely,” he said. “At that point in time after the T20 World Cup, I’m sure Rob Key did a real in-depth look at everything to do with the white-ball set-up. I had some good conversations with Keysy and I said I didn’t want to be doing it because I’m the only person to do it, I want to be doing it because I’m the right person to do it. He believed I could lead the team forward and captain into the future and take the team into a good place.”
“All sorts of things run through your mind,” he said of time spent considering his future. “I think you try and work through everything [Captaincy] is something I’ve really enjoyed the honour of doing and something I believe I can do well. When you really come down to it and think about the decision you’re going to make, it actually becomes very clear that now you’re determined to do it and keep going.”
The addition of Brendon McCullum as head coach has given Buttler a fresh lease of life. When the Kiwi’s name was first mentioned for the white ball coach, Buttler thought the appointment would be “impossible”, but with the calendar easing in 2025, McCullum felt he could juggle both commitments.
“When you get an injury like that it makes you realise how desperately you want to get back, and the stuff that you really enjoy doing, so that’s the mindset I’ve got. I had some chats with Baz about how this stage of your career can actually be the most rewarding,” Buttler said. “He spoke about his own experiences as captain in the last few years of when he was playing, it’s not about you at all, it’s about creating that environment and letting people flourish and how seeing them go to the top of the mountain was some of the happiest times of his career as a player. And that’s exactly what I want to get out of them,” he again shared.
With a renewed commitment to the England set-up, Jos Buttler says he wants to play “as much as he can” over the coming years and “help develop the next era of white-ball cricket” as well.
He added, “You get a nice perspective of, when cricket’s taken away from you, how great it is, how important it is and how much you enjoy it. It’s all the little things that you sometimes take for granted that you really miss the most, like being around the changing room, pulling the shirt on. When you start to think about it, it gives you a lot of hunger and motivation to get back, put the work in and get playing again.”
“When you get an injury like that it makes you realise how desperately you want to get back, and the stuff that you really enjoy doing, so that’s the mindset of however long I’ve got back. I think throughout the three ODIs [against West Indies], Jacob Bethell scoring his maiden fifty, Dan Mousley [also] in the last game, you see those guys getting that opportunity and grabbing it which is incredibly exciting. And whatever that means in terms of squads, that’s exciting for English cricket,” Jos Buttler concluded.
