Why Jos Buttler should be England’s next white ball coach

4 minute read

Our suspicion is that England’s white ball teams will get where they need to go sooner if Jos Buttler takes on the role of coach as well as captain. Bear with us on this.

England have had both a bad World Cup and a meh World Cup inside the last 12 months. They’re aiming a bit higher than that, so they’ve sacked white ball coach Matthew Mott.

Despite presiding over exactly the same failures, Jos Buttler will stay on as captain.

Let’s have a recap.

Conviction

England often talk about playing with conviction, yet Mott and Buttler demonstrated little but uncertainty during the 2023 50-over World Cup campaign.

A few weeks out from the tournament, they played an unexpected game of musical chairs with their batters. In the end, Jason Roy was the one who missed out, but plenty of others spent that same period wondering/worrying about their places.

By our reckoning, four players – Jonny Bairstow, Dawid Malan, Harry Brook and Liam Livingstone – arrived in India having expended significant mental energy fretting about whether they would be selected. It’s easy to imagine this style of man management might have given rise to a degree of anxiety in some of the bowlers too. Was every place still up for grabs?

The uncertainty – which was in large part borne of rarely getting a first-choice squad between World Cups – persisted into the tournament itself. By their fourth game, England were making what Mott called “subtle changes,” which apparently involved replacing three players – one short of the maximum possible with a 15-man squad.

Expressing yourself

There have been tactical failures too. Buttler famously opted to bowl first in brutal heat in Mumbai against South Africa – which didn’t pan out too well. A few months later, the captain’s gut only picked up on the short boundary and wind direction in Bridgetown after he had already invited Will Jacks to open the bowling against Australia. What was only the third over of Jacks’ international T20 career ended up getting slammed for 22.

It was the disconnect between what they said they wanted to do and how they actually behaved that strikes us as being the main failing of the Mott-Buttler axis though.

Just as they spoke about playing with conviction while demonstrating little themselves, Ali Martin’s Guardian piece this morning points to a related failure of messaging. He writes that some of the T20 World Cup players were left grumbling that a supposed freedom to express themselves was contradictorily issued with a side order of prescriptive, over-thought instruction.

“Not that the fingers were necessarily being pointed at the head coach in this regard,” adds Martin, pointedly.

Shared responsibility

In cricket, the captain-coach relationship needs to be complementary. Someone needs to be the strategist, someone needs to be the tactician and one way or another, they need to find a way of managing (and looking after) their players. It doesn’t really matter how you slice and dice all of that, as long as the end result is clear, coherent, consistent and competent.

After that early success at the 2022 T20 World Cup, Mott-Buttler did not prove a successful combination. Maybe they were too similar and had much the same weaknesses. Or maybe one or the other simply wasn’t pulling his weight. It’s hard to know exactly.

Joint accountability is therefore a tricky one – particularly when coaches are just fundamentally easier to replace. With no massively obvious immediate replacement for Buttler among the playing staff and no huge appetite for eroding their best batter’s sense of self worth, there was really only one way this could play out. Mott has been sacked; Buttler will stay on.

Expandy foam

The challenge for England’s Managing Director of Cricket, Rob Key, is to now find a coach who complements Captain Buttler. The finer points of man management and a basic comprehension that actions in that particular area speak far louder than words would seem to be the vital skills to our mind.

But maybe Buttler’s leadership shortcomings are more far-reaching than that? For all that he’s great at whipping the ball into the stands with those adamantium wrists of his, maybe he’s simply not very good at all this stuff. It’s not like they’re similar areas. Joe Root, Alastair Cook – you don’t have to go too far back to find great England players who were poor captains.

How many gaps in the captain-coach role need filling here? Is it one big wedge into which a new coach can neatly slot? A few chunky holes that can be filled with exactly the right-shaped Tetris piece? Or are there cracks and faults everywhere? Does Key need the coaching equivalent of expanding foam to spray into the void?

Perhaps there is an ideal candidate out there who will tesselate perfectly. However, our suspicion is that Buttler’s particular weaknesses may become more apparent once he’s been conjoined with a second coach for a while.

If that’s the case – and given Buttler has retained his job as captain – perhaps it would be quicker to load all the accountability into one basket. At least then we might arrive at a clean slate a little sooner.

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