“The consistent message is to always take the game on. We must try and play with a level of freedom and allow ourselves to express the huge amounts of talent we have as a group.” – Jos Buttler
Telford Vice / Melbourne
JOSS Buttler strode out of his press conference at the MCG on Saturday fuelled by an urgency that suggested he was late for an appointment. His strong, straight steps left no doubt he was required somewhere else.
He neither paused nor stopped, and needed maybe 10 seconds to go from his seat behind the microphones to the doors of the lift that would take him towards England’s last training session before the T20 World Cup final against Pakistan on Sunday.
Babar Azam, who had been and gone by the time Buttler arrived, took a different approach. After his presser he rose and moved towards the exit — and was instantly besieged by reporters wanting a photograph, a word, a moment with him. He was less a man on his way out of the room than a sainted icon at the epicentre of a religious procession.
Babar seems to bear this aspect of the job — the vocation? the calling? — of captaining Pakistan with patience and grace. Indeed it was up to security staff and ICC minders to extricate him from the clamour. Babar himself looked like he had all day to hang out and chat. That might have been true, because, and as was the case before their semi-final against New Zealand in Sydney on Wednesday, Pakistan did not train on Saturday.
But, as England will know and New Zealand found out the hard way when they lost the semi by seven wickets, that doesn’t mean Pakistan are not ready. They were born ready. In any event, the English are the kind of team who dot the Is and cross the Ts even on the lists they make to ensure they have dotted the Is and crossed the Ts on the important stuff. They are organised to within an inch of their humanity, leaving nothing to chance except the toss. That can inhibit spontaneity, but it means you win more than you lose.
Even when you don’t win. Like neither England nor New Zealand did in the 2019 ODI World Cup final. Nevertheless the English were given the trophy after a breathlessly tense contest on the frankly spurious grounds that they had hit more boundaries. Kane Williamson referenced that injustice on Wednesday when he was asked why a New Zealand team who have been to a dozen semi-finals and three finals in both white-ball formats had yet to win a global trophy: “We’ve played in a number of different finals and put out really good performances, probably good enough to win, and either got met by a side that’s played a little bit better or a side that’s played about equal.”
That matters because, despite all the hype about Sunday’s match reprising the 1992 World Cup final between England and Pakistan, what happened at Lord’s three years ago is far more relevant. Buttler’s 59 was an important part of England’s performance. Ben Stokes, Chris Woakes, Adil Rashid and Mark Wood were also in the XI that day, and have been prominent in England’s campaign in this tournament.
Win, lose or neither, having gone through the 2019 fire can only help Buttler’s team. “Any experiences that you can draw on, good or bad, you will have learnt from,” he said. “You can reflect on them in situations of adversity or a bit of chaos. Those are all things that can happen in a World Cup final. There’s a good chance. The more experience you’ve got of being able to understand those feelings and how to react to them, I definitely see that as a benefit.”
Similarly, England had leaned on the lessons of their poor batting in their only loss in this tournament. “The Ireland match was a big disappointment for us, but it feels a long time ago now being able to sit in this position on the eve of the World Cup final,” Buttler said. “We know the areas we were short and that definitely hurt us. We’ve seen the reaction to that game in the rest of the cricket we’ve played so far.”
After their stumble, England reeled off convincing victories against New Zealand and Sri Lanka to reach the semi-finals, where they demolished India by 10 wickets. Buttler’s team are a far cry from the side who lost half of their first 14 white-ball games after he was appointed captain in June, even as England’s Test team were surging to six ever more emphatic victories in seven matches.
“It’s part of my own journey as a player and a person to now be at this stage of my career where I’m the captain; learning something very new that I haven’t done before,” Buttler said. “It’s exciting to get the chance to do that; it keeps things interesting. I feel like I’m improving day by day; getting the job and feeling more comfortable in the role as it goes on. As frustrating as the summer was in terms of results I learnt a huge amount through that period, with the benefit of having a few months after to reflect on things I probably would have done differently or which situations arose and how they made me feel and how I reacted to them. I feel like I’m growing into the role.”
Leadership, even the more demonstrative and so perhaps less English elements of it like delivering inspiring team talks, comes naturally to him: “I’ve never been shy of addressing the team that I’m playing in, whether I’m captain or not.” What was his guiding philosophy? “It depends on the feel around the group on that day, the situation ahead of us or the situation we’ve just gone through. So the messages change, but the consistent message is to always take the game on. We must try and play with a level of freedom and allow ourselves to express the huge amounts of talent we have as a group.”
Currently the message is to not look past the elephant in the room — that Sunday’s game is not just another game of cricket but England’s biggest since the 2019 World Cup final: “It’s fine to think about those things and what it might feel like or what it would mean. They’re certainly feelings I don’t feel we need to block out or push away. We must accept those kinds of things as the noise that comes with a World Cup final; accepting that it feels different. Of course it is.”
The weather will be a key difference compared to that blazing summer’s day at Lord’s. The forecast for rain has risen to 100%, and as much as 20mm might fall. Monday is a reserve day, but a 95% chance of rain has been predicted.
That carries echoes of England’s match against the Irish, which became a Duckworth/Lewis shootout. “In the lead-up to that game the weather around Melbourne was dominating the whole tournament,” Buttler said. “It was definitely a distraction at times.” And, you heard the man, there’s a lesson to be drawn from that.
Buttler speaks with an easy, relaxed sincerity; smiling often but never overly enthusiastically, and showing due respect for the questions he is asked. He would impress the parents of any prospective partner he is taken home to meet, and could easily gravitate into a career as the television face of any company that sells wholesomeness. He is so worryingly nice that it’s a relief to remember that he called Vernon Philander a “fucking knobhead” during a Test at Newlands in January 2020.
The man has an edge after all, and we may just have seen a glimpse of it as he marched sharply out of his press conference on Saturday.
First published by Cricbuzz.
Bulletproof Truth 