Posted by Jos Buttler hasn’t always impressed us as England’s white ball captain. But man… this was below the belt.
We don’t habitually read “employee backs his boss” type articles because they don’t tend to be awash with intriguing thoughts that enrich our life. But in this case, the BBC headline sucked us in…
Buttler captaining better than I did at times – Root
We’re not sure whether anyone’s yet devised a metric for faintness of praise, but it would be interesting to see this one quantified. It’s pretty faint. Probably somewhere around ‘pencilled-in by a ghost who subsequently changed their mind and then tried to rub it out’.
Because ‘Buttler captaining better than I did’ isn’t a colossal compliment from someone who began his leadership career with the nickname ‘craptain’ and arguably went downhill from there. To then qualify this with ‘at times’ takes this to another level.
“Buttler captaining better than I did at times” isn’t a direct quote, obviously, and Root did admittedly call him “a brilliant leader” at one point.
Nevertheless, the headline appears to derive from this comment: “I certainly think that this team are doing more things right than maybe some of the teams I captained.”
That’s a great ‘maybe’, introducing an element of doubt about clearance of a bar that is essentially lying flat on the ground.
Are Jos Buttler’s England doing more things right than a Test team that rested its two all-time top wicket-takers from the first Test of an Ashes tour so that they could be preserved for deployment as two-fifths of an attack comprising nothing but right-arm fast-medium bowlers come the second?
The answer to that is ‘maybe’.
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