England’s Jos Buttler on the IPL: ‘In India you have to deal with chaos, and it helps dealing with expectation’

Interview: Ahead of the 2019 IPL, Buttler reflects on a journey that has taken him out of the Test wilderness and into the very heart of England’s cricketing future at the end of a transformational 12 months

This time last year, Jos Buttler could have been forgiven for wondering – on some profound and existential level – what it was all for.

He was one of the world’s greatest short-form batsmen. Nobody questioned that. But since losing his place in the England Test side towards the end of 2016, he had spent the months traipsing around the world, flying from one franchised Twenty20 tournament to the next, stateless and rootless. In the space of 15 months, he had played almost 100 games of cricket. Just four had involved a red ball. One of the greatest talents of the age was fulfilling merely a fraction of his true, genre-spanning potential.

What a difference 12 months makes. Now, Buttler can reflect on a journey that has taken him out of the Test wilderness and into the very heart of England’s cricketing future. In the longer format, he has quietly become one of England’s most indispensable batsmen, able to control a game through immaculate poise or sheer brute force. In the shorter forms, he continues to loosen jaws the world over. A home Ashes series and a World Cup await. But first, he is preparing another assault on the competition he credits for turning it all around: the Indian Premier League.

In a way, the recent story of Buttler’s career can be told in his IPL numbers. His first season, with the Mumbai Indians in 2016, was a bitter disappointment: after attracting one of the highest bids for an overseas player in the auction, he batted 14 innings for a highest score of just 41. The following season saw only the merest of improvements: one half-century in 10 attempts.

Buttler now freely admits that his initial experience of the IPL circus overwhelmed him. “You have to deal with that chaos,” he explains. “It might be the timings of things. It might be training’s not perfect. We’re very lucky in England: everything’s very structured. But in India you have to deal with chaos, and I think that helps dealing with expectation.”

By the time he was signed by the Rajasthan Royals last year, Buttler had a better idea of the demands on him, and how best to fulfil them. He was promoted to open the batting, and set the tournament alight, averaging 55 at a ridiculous strike rate of 155. Empowered and emboldened, Buttler was finally a batsman ready to take on the world: a transformation due in no small part to the his mentor at the Royals: one Shane Warne.

They made an unlikely pair: the outspoken Australian veteran with a poker player’s brazenness and an opinion on everything and the reserved Somerset boy with tree trunks for arms and a love of the quiet life. But when they started talking about cricket, something clicked. “It was amazing,” Buttler remembers now. “He’s got that innate skill: sometimes it feels like he sees things other people don’t.

“He talked about Test cricket. ‘Why are you not playing? How are you going to get back in the team?’ And it felt genuine. It wasn’t just someone trying to blow my tyres up to get me to do well for the Royals. Which gave me a huge amount of confidence, and being confident is the biggest thing in most sports.”

It feels strange to hear Buttler talking about fluctuating confidence. Anyone who has seen him play one of his finer innings, that combination of power and deftness and audacity and mastery, would struggle to believe Buttler would ever want for self-assurance. But during his early years in the crucible of international cricket, whether through a poor run of form or a scathing article on the internet, it did wane, and often.

Jos Buttler has enjoyed a transformational 12 months (Getty Images)

“I think I have an innate inner confidence,” he explains, “one that I don’t feel I need to prove all the time. There will be times throughout your career when it does dip a little bit. Whether it’s from within, or something you guys have written. How do you deal with those things? How do you protect your confidence when people from the outside are questioning you?”

Buttler is keen not to vilify the media. “They’re just doing their job,” he says. “But it can help you, or you can take it personally. Younger versions of yourself, particularly. Cricket takes so long. There’s a lot of airtime to fill. Guys have to talk about someone’s technique for half an hour. Further down the line, you know how to deal with it. And it doesn’t affect you as much as it might have done.”

Buttler remembers a conversation from earlier his career with Andrew Strauss, when he played a few games on loan at Somerset. Strauss explained that one of the biggest challenges of international cricket was the increased scrutiny: the hundreds of pens, the millions of eyes, each gaze accompanied by its own opinion. It is why he is especially impressed by the stars of the Indian team, who go about their business with the added pressure of a nation’s angst on their shoulders.

“Rohit Sharma was the real star at Mumbai Indians,” he remembers. “And you wouldn’t see him out and about, because he couldn’t be. He’s too popular. You think about someone like [Virat] Kohli: all the runs he scores with the weight of a nation who expects. You earn an incredible amount of respect for them.”

The commensurate rewards, of course, are lavish. So would Buttler trade his love of the quiet life for the adulation of his Indian counterparts? He prevaricates. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m quite content with who I am and what I do. You might get someone in your local Tesco who might know who you are. But not really. To think you couldn’t do those simple things, I’d say I’d probably crave them quite a lot.”

Another of Buttler’s team-mates who will face added scrutiny over the coming weeks is captain Steven Smith, returning to the front-line after serving a one-year ban for the infamous Cape Town cheating incident. Does Buttler have any sympathy for Smith’s predicament? “Not really,” he says. “I didn’t like what was going on. It was a very harsh punishment, and credit to the players for not challenging it, accepting that they’d made a mistake. It’s been a sour episode; I’m sure it’s been tough on Australian cricket. But the punishment’s over, and I think everyone is happy to get on with it.”

For now, Buttler is happy to leave talk of this summer’s Ashes to one side. The IPL is a prestigious tournament in its own right, he insists, and one that demands his full focus. Additionally, he waters down the idea of using it as preparation for the World Cup. Why peak later, he argues, when you can peak now?

“The idea of peaking isn’t really an idea that sits naturally in my mindset,” he explains. “Sometimes you hear people talking about going to another level. Why can’t you just stay at peak level? Someone like Kohli scores a hundred every game. He doesn’t think: ‘Ah, that was ok, I’ll peak at some point’. Just do it every day. That’s the sort of mindset I’ve been wanting to hit.”

Jos Buttler has found some of his best form (AP)

Buttler is at his most engaging when talking about mindsets, about projecting utter stillness in the heat of battle. It is why, initially at least, he found white-ball cricket a much easier proposition than Tests. “The situation is clear and laid out for you,” he says. “You can look at the scoreboard and think: ‘Right, six an over, how do I go about that? Who’s got overs left? Which ends are people bowling? Who’s the danger bowler? Who I can target?’

“Being an overseas player is a new experience as well. You’re one of four, rather than one of 11. Dealing with that chaos as well: someone like [MS] Dhoni, who is coolness personified most of the time. A lot of the time, it’s making sure you show that externally, even if you’re not on the inside. And a lot of trust in your ability, that allows you then to let your subconscious take over in the middle.”

And when Buttler’s subconscious does take over, history suggests the results can be spectacular. His brilliant 150 off 77 balls in the recent one-day series against the West Indies in Grenada was just the latest entry in a book of outstanding England white-ball innings that Buttler is rewriting from scratch. Yet it wasn’t enough to seal the series: the ODIs were shared 2-2, with the Tests going 2-0 to the home side and England sweeping the T20s, for which Buttler was rested. “A middling tour,” is his verdict. “Two really disappointing Test performances, which hurt a lot. The one-dayers were a really good challenge. It could have gone a lot better, but there’s still some positives to take.”

Which is, after all, the mantra of this England side. Barring accidents, they will go into the World Cup on 30 May as the clear favourites: No1 in the world, and with the benefit of home advantage. England have never won a 50-over tournament at home or overseas, but Buttler insists that the pressure of the situation will not cower them. “It won’t be a side that plays cautiously that wins the World Cup,” he says. “Even in knockout games, it will be a side that plays some brave cricket and smart cricket. If we’re at a crossroads, we’ve been going down the positive route.”

But for now, Buttler is slipping on his Rajasthan blue and heading for Jaipur. The IPL has attracted a good deal of sniffiness in its decade of existence, especially in this country, but Buttler believes it’s an increasingly tough stance to maintain. “Right from when it started, it was always something I was drawn to,” he admits. “I liked the style of cricket, I liked everything that went along with it.”

And as Buttler’s own trajectory demonstrates, it’s a tournament with the power to make and break careers. “It was always a tournament I was desperate to play and do well in. I remember a training session that Mumbai Indians had at a university, and they had a 20,000 seater stadium half-full. Just to watch training. The TV rights are not far behind being worth the same as a Premier League football match. When you get your head around that, you start to understand how big a tournament it is. You can’t ignore the magnitude of the IPL, and the reach it has.”

The Independent spoke to Rajasthan Royals star Jos Buttler ahead of the IPL 2019