Jos Buttler isn't the answer
Jos Buttler isn't the answer
England are good at 'resets' and now is the time for another, in the ODI game
This is a piece that, eighteen months ago, I suspected I would write, but that I really didn’t want to. It is not an in-depth analysis of England under Jos Buttler - that can come later. Nor is it an attack on the man, but a question about England cricket, institutionally, and some of the weaknesses in leadership that cause its not-infrequent collapses.
It’s early December, and England have just wrapped up an ODI series in the West Indies. After finishing a dismal seventh (below Afghanistan, but just high enough to qualify for the Champions Trophy, which at points looked seriously under threat), and with a Test tour of India booked for the New Year, England could not be allowed some well-earned R&R after a brutal year that started in South Africa, and has included the most hotly-contested Ashes series since 2005 and a World Cup in India. No, on they must go, to North Sound and Bridgetown, to play three ODIs against a team that failed to even qualify for the 10-team World Cup, and then… no more ODI cricket until September.
Of course they lost!
Jos Buttler is not the answer
England's World Cup was pretty disastrous, the issues mainly in their batting. But it's Jos Buttler’s captaincy and management of his bowlers that's going to hold them back in future.
I wasn't able to write particularly extensively over the last six months, mostly because of my Real Job. As a consequence, I also didn't catch too much of the World Cup and from what I did see, I wasn't missing much.
Now, I’ll level with you. I never really thought that Buttler was the man for the job of England's white-ball captain. Eoin Morgan’s greatest strength was not just in the revolutionary approach he took to England’s batting, scoring 400 in the very first game after the dismal 2015 World Cup. It was the way in which he managed his bowlers, building Adil Rashid into one of (if not the) best spinners in the world, attacking with pace and different angles in the powerplay and keeping things tight at the back end of the innings. Before, and now after, Morgan, it’s often looked like England send their bowlers as lambs to the slaughter, asking the opposition to rack up a score that will inevitably prove too much for England to chase.
Player Questions
Barring Harry Brook’s heroics on Saturday night, it’s looked all too often under Buttler as though England have lacked answers and batting firepower. The drop-off in form of Jason Roy is undoubtedly a big loss, as well as Joe Root and Jonny Bairstow’s diminishing returns, but a hallmark of Morgan’s strength as a captain was in his ability to drop players who lost form or the confidence of the management team ruthlessly. Alex Hales, Chris Jordan, David Willey and others all felt the sharp end of this policy, as did Liam Plunkett, who was dropped abruptly after the 2019 triumph apparently because Morgan did not believe he’d be able to perform the same role in 2023. But the players who have come in have hardly lit the world alight, and England don’t seem sure of their best XI.
Dawid Malan was their best player in the year up to the end of the World Cup, but is unlikely to be around in 2027 so has not made the trip to the West Indies. Crawley and Duckett have shown their capacity to be attacking openers in the Test arena, and perhaps deserve an extended run of form in the ODI arena, while Rehan Ahmed and Will Jacks are younger players with bright futures - the challenge for England is to stick with them and help them develop through the inevitable tricky patches. I’m delighted to see Ahmed and Rashid in the same XI and I hope they continue to play together until at least 2025, while Jacks is probably a better bowler than Joe Root and is good enough with the bat to command a place on his own. Harry Brook should also benefit from an extended run in the side.
Where there are question marks are over those more experienced players - Liam Livingstone, Sam Curran, Phil Salt and Jos Buttler. All have shown flashes of true brilliance, and Salt’s maiden T20 hundred on Saturday is a huge boost - he needs to kick on now. Curran has blown hot and very cold since his bravura performance to win the T20 World Cup last year, while Livingstone has great potential with bat and ball but has not yet shown enough in either discipline to be a true number 6 or second spinner. He’s a luxury player - he augments an already-strong batting or bowling line-up, but does not in himself turn a good team into a great one. These players are all under pressure, and, good as they are, Luke Wright should not be afraid to have a look at others after the T20 World Cup.
The Statistics
The stats make for pretty grim reading for Buttler. Compared to his two immediate predecessors as full-time ODI captain, Eoin Morgan and Alastair Cook, he comes out pretty poorly:
Morgan’s England were the best in both categories, scoring at more than half a run per over on average quicker than the opposition and making 6.25 runs more per wicket. Over the course of fifty overs, this equates to more than 25 runs per completed innings, or 62.5 runs for every ten wickets taken.
Buttler’s team also scores quicker than the opposition, but by a much smaller margin - and this margin is made in the field, where his team concedes 0.27 runs per over more than Morgan’s, and scores marginally less quickly with the bat. Under Buttler, England score 3.43 runs fewer per wicket than their opposition, a difference of nearly ten runs from Morgan’s teams, who were 6.25 runs better off. So Buttler’s England lose wickets more regularly than Morgan’s team, despite scoring at a similar rate, and - crucially - concede runs at a quicker rate. Given Buttler has also had access to much of the same attack as Morgan - minus only Liam Plunkett, really, and Jofra Archer at times - I think he must shoulder a lot of responsibility for this as captain.
The Hundred
I can’t get out of writing about it. The simple fact is, England don’t currently know what their best ODI team is, at a time when ODI cricket is moving further and further from T20 cricket. The English 50-over competition is essentially for County second teams, overlapping as it does with the Hundred. That competition is a fine way to identify T20 players, but administrators seem to forget that England already has a T20 competition, with an existing fanbase, whose attendances have suffered since the introduction of the Hundred. You just can’t help but wonder what could have been if the ECB had pumped all that money, and the FTA television slots, into the T20 Blast and its marquee games like the Roses match, Surrey-Middlesex, Worcestershire-Warwickshire, and many others.
The fact of the matter is England have deprioritised ODI cricket just as their one-day team reached its peak - a ludicrous act after not even coming close to a World Cup win since 1992. If the T20 World Cup goes belly-up, we have to wonder what the point of the Hundred is, even by its own designs.
What now?
England don’t play more ODIs now until they face Australia in September. To my mind, Buttler and Mott deserve the chance to defend the T20 title they won in 2022 - it’s a more fickle beast than the 50-over game, and any team that can chase 220-odd is a decent shout. But both should be giving serious thought to whether they carry on into the next ODI World Cup cycle. Buttler’s an England great, our best white-ball batsman and he’s become a fine keeper, but he’s not the most tactically astute and it may be that he’s simply trying to do too much. Perhaps handing over the reigns to a Zak Crawley for the next cycle will be the right thing to do.
As for Mott, he’s won a T20 World Cup with England, and his record with Australia is outstanding. But at the moment, he’s failed to give England a clear direction in terms of team selection or tactics with bat or ball, and with talented young coaches like Jonathan Trott working wonders with Afghanistan, a bad tournament in the West Indies and USA could seal his fate. The ECB should surely be thinking about the difference a change of coach made to the Test team…