How long can England blindly ride on Jos Buttler’s potential

This was not the first time that Buttler walked out to the middle to such an introduction. Nor will this be the last. If anything, of the 74 times Buttler has batted in Test cricket, he might have very well walked out to such an introduction on at least 50 occasions. Such is his potential; such is his talent. Such is the nonchalant natural ability that he possesses that you can’t help but give rein to your imagination and muse on how good it would be if he gets going.

And, for the first since the latter half of 2018, it looked like he played each ball to its own merit. He first carefully negated the imminent threat of Holder and Roach by not throwing his hands at anything that was outside of the fourth stump and then identified Shannon Gabriel - whose radar was off post lunch - as his target and smashed him on multiple occasions through the off-side to get his own score ticking; a trademark ‘Buttler punch’ off the backfoot, that we have adored and admired in coloured clothing, suggested that this could be ‘the innings’. Yet, in the end, it turned out to be a smokescreen for yet another half-baked, incomplete batting performance. For the umpteenth time in the last 30-odd innings, it felt that he left the crease without doing a satisfactory job; without doing what the team asked of him.

To start off with, the idea and thought process behind giving players an extended run in the team purely based on gut feel and/or talent is not flawed. A team like India, for instance, elevated Rohit Sharma to the opening spot in Tests and picked Jasprit Bumrah in red-ball cricket purely based on potential, gut feel and their limited-overs form, when clearly there were a handful of other more deserving candidates - and it paid off. However, there needs to be a realistic line drawn by the management on how much time they would be willing to give to that particular player before pulling the plug.

In Buttler’s case, that seems to be endless. For two years - from giving him an extended run at No.6, No.7 and No.8 to playing him as a specialist batsman to even giving him the license to treat Test matches like ODIs -  the management have tried everything that they possibly could to help Buttler stamp his authority in the Test side and yet, no move has led to him transforming into the vital cog they have envisioned.

It could be argued that he was somewhat ‘lucky’ to have found himself still a part of the first XI for the first Test. Post the dismal tour of South Africa - where he averaged a hideous 16.42 in 7 innings - Buttler was all set to be replaced by Ben Foakes for the Sri Lanka Tests before the pandemic brought the tour to an abrupt halt. The four months of non-action seemed to have tilted the tide once again in his favour as he was preferred over Foakes for the Ageas Bowl Test - despite the former outscoring him in the intra-squad warm-up game. The question, though, is not whether Foakes is good enough to overthrow Buttler in the Test side; rather, it is whether Buttler has done enough to justify the long rope that he’s been given by the management. As things stand, the answer is a big no. 

Perhaps, it could just be rust. Perhaps, we are reading too much into an innings which was Buttler’s first in Test cricket in almost six months. Perhaps, with a couple of games under his belt, he might even end up scoring the coveted second Test century that has evaded him for over two years now. But that is contradictory to the argument that was made by the board themselves prior to the lockdown, which was that Buttler needed a break to re-energize himself and be at his best in the longest format, owing to the fact that he’d been drained and exhausted by the sheer amount of cricket he’d played. Well, he got the break he needed, but he still owes the team all the runs he did not score in the past 18 months.