England have just finished playing Australia in a one-day series. The first match came three days after the T20 World Cup final and the man who went on to captain England in the second game called that scheduling “horrible”. With the bare minimum diplomacy, England’s coach said the series was one his team would “have to be really professional about.” Now the actual captain has described it as ‘a good example of how not to keep bilateral cricket relevant’.

We sometimes ponder the whereabouts of the threshold at which cricket concludes, ‘okay, this is getting ridiculous now – this is simply not a thing that anyone wants any more’.

We are, first and foremost, a fan. We like cricket. We love cricket. We have been writing a whole bloody website about cricket for 16 years. And we love international cricket most of all.

One of the things we have written for this website is a calendar that pares away great swathes of international cricket that we are now consciously trying to ignore. It is not that we do not love these matches; it is that these matches actually diminish our fundamental love of the game. They actively drain our enthusiasm, bleeding the capacity for excitement from us so that there’s less available in the matches we do love.

And again: we’re a fan.

The players’ view

But no-one’s paying attention to the King Cricket Essentials Calendar when they’re scheduling series. We’re insignificant. As long as there are enough people who are kind of half-paying attention, an international cricket series is worth staging. So series get staged.

The players, when taken as a whole, are broadly okay with this. For a lot who would otherwise only be on the cusp of international selection, an extra game here or there tips them into fulfilling a lifetime ambition of playing for their country. Plus everyone gets paid.

But then there are the senior players; the successful players; the ones who’ve reached the summit of the game and found it to be a great sprawling plateau where they’re obliged to cover a surprising amount of ground. These players tend to reach a point where they manage the situation themselves and start ‘specialising’ (which is really just a euphemism for giving up formats they’d actually quite like to continue playing if that were in any way a realistic undertaking).

> Separate teams? What might a world of cricket format specialists actually look like?

But by and large everyone toes the party line: Every series is important, somehow. Every series is an opportunity, for someone.

But England really haven’t treated this one-day series against Australia like that.

“We always saw that series as being something that we will have to be really professional about,” said coach, Matthew Mott – which was not exactly giving it the hard sell.

“We have to do it, and while we’re here we might as well do it,” said Moeen Ali, sounding similarly enthused.

And now, in the aftermath, captain Jos Buttler has had his say too.

Speaking to the BBC, Buttler concluded: “I think lots of people are talking about how to keep bilateral cricket relevant and this series is a good example of how not to do it.”

Even the broadcasters weren’t into it. BT Sport had the rights, where pundit Steve Harmison summed it up as: “Meaningless cricket played in a meaningless way. Fulfilling the fixtures – that’s all it did.”

So where is the line beyond which we can all agree, “this is getting ridiculous”?

Where exactly is that “this is simply not a thing that anyone wants any more” threshold?

England have just played Australia and collectively given a pretty strong impression that they were only really doing so under sufferance. Is that the kind of cricket you want to watch? Do you truly believe that as ‘international cricket’ these matches carry equal weight to those that take place in a World Cup?

Buttler continued: “One of the biggest things is having overlapping series. We’ve got a group of players preparing for a Test series in Pakistan and we’ve got another group playing here at the same time. In the New Year a Test match finishes one day, and an ODI series against Bangladesh starts the next.

“I feel a bit for the players to be honest, the ones who are young and coming into the game at the moment, you want to play all formats but I don’t think the schedule allows you to.”

This whole situation is what is known as “a bollocks”. Buttler suggests spreading ICC tournaments out a bit (maybe not having a World Cup every year, say) – but that isn’t really enough because the situation is way beyond that. It is in fact “a complete bollocks”. (Pointless T20 leagues are increasingly vying with pointless bilateral series for pointlessness supremacy.)

> How popular are all these Not-Quite-The-IPL franchise leagues actually likely to be?

The people who most love the game say it’s a complete bollocks. The people who play the game say it’s a complete bollocks. Even the broadcasters concede that from time to time certain series are a complete bollocks.

Please stop shaping the whole damn sport around the types of people who’ll always stick a match on the telly in the background if there happens to be one on.

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If you want to be highly regarded as a wicketkeeper-batter, one of the smartest things you can do is not actually keep wicket in a whole load of Test matches.

At what point do you become a wicketkeeper? How frequently do you have to don pads and gloves and chunter away relentlessly to be considered a proper specialist in that weird squatty role?

There was a spell a few years back when a bunch of people started referring to Ollie Pope as a wicketkeeper – England selectors mainly.

Let’s be clear: Ollie Pope was not and is not a wicketkeeper. Ollie Pope is a batter who has occasionally kept wicket. He may own a pair of gloves, but that is only because he is the kind of posh kid who owns all the equipment for every last thing he is even faintly interested in. Ollie Pope has a snowboard. Ollie Pope has a Gretsch County Gentleman. Ollie Pope has wicketkeeping gloves.

How do we know Ollie Pope is not a wicketkeeper? Because at the time of writing, Ollie Pope still hasn’t stumped anyone in professional cricket. There are many ways to put together your definition of wicketkeeper, but we put it to you that at least one stumping is a prerequisite.

Maybe if it’s your professional debut and you’re keeping wicket in that game, we can give you a bit of leeway. And we suppose stumpings aren’t always that common, so it might take a handful of matches before you got that first one. But if you’re Ollie Pope and you’ve played over 100 matches as a pro and you’ve never stumped anyone, you are not a wicketkeeper. You are a glove owner.

There have been a few players down the years who have progressed from glove ownership to being fully-fledged wicketkeepers and this is where things get a bit tricksy. Where is the line? What other factors are we looking at?

We don’t want to overcomplicate this. We’d argue there are really just two main, overlapping types of genuine wicketkeeper.

1. The player who currently keeps wicket most of the time
2. The player who has done a lot of wicketkeeping

If a player keeps wicket more than half the time, it seems fair to consider them a wicketkeeper. Equally, if a player no longer keeps wicket, but previously did so for several years and has a pretty big body of glovework behind them, we’re happy to consider that person a wicketkeeper too.

That’s not precisely what we’re digging into today though. Today we’re looking at five players who people widely consider to be Test wicketkeepers, who quite often didn’t actually keep wicket.

Jos Buttler – a Test wicketkeeper 65% of the time

37 matches as keeper, 20 as an outfielder

Despite his memorably pioneering work as a specialist number seven batter, Jos Buttler has actually kept wicket for England rather frequently.

He’s mostly been okay too. Certainly better than some would have you believe. Not brilliant. Not 100 per cent reliable. Bit shonky against the spinners. But more okay than he usually gets credit for. The fact he often gets pushed towards the batter-who-keeps pigeonhole is probably more to do with longstanding wicketkeeping tropes than his actual aptitude for the job.

In Tests, Buttler averages 29.60 as wicketkeeper with one hundred, and 35.68 without the gloves, also with one hundred.

Weird closing fact: Buttler has way more professional stumpings to his name than either Ben Foakes or Jonny Bairstow. That’s in large part down to the nature of limited overs cricket, but it’s still the kind of thing you might like to post on Twitter next time you’re having a dumb argument with someone about those three players.

Alec Stewart – a Test wicketkeeper 62% of the time

82 matches as keeper, 51 as an outfielder

Stewart is well-known for being the ‘better batter’ option in the Alec Stewart v Jack Russell 1990s wicketkeeping tussle. He’s also a good example of how keeping can sometimes impact a player’s batting.

> The 1990s-est England Test XI

The Gaffer averaged 34.92 as a wicketkeeper with six hundreds, but 46.70 as a specialist batter with nine hundreds.

For what it’s worth, Russell averaged 27.10 in 54 Tests with two hundreds. We haven’t really investigated this thoroughly, but being as it was the 1990s we know for a fact the various batters who played instead of him definitely didn’t average 39 – which is what was apparently needed to make up the 12 runs the team shed each time it put Stewart on leaping and jabbering duties.

Jonny Bairstow – a Test wicketkeeper 59% of the time

49 matches as keeper, 34 as an outfielder

There are part-time wicketkeepers, occasional wicketkeepers and out-and-out wicketkeepers. And then there’s Jonny Bairstow, for whom being a wicketkeeper is a part of his identity on a level more profound than probably even he understands. England have at times been guilty of not really properly appreciating that fact.

David Bairstow played four Tests for England (which was enough for him to get that all-important stumping). His son has so far kept wicket in 49 Tests.

> Buttler, Bairstow and Foakes – England’s embarrassment of adequacy

Bairstow’s record is currently the reverse of Stewart’s. He has averaged 37.37 when playing as England’s wicketkeeper, with five tons; and 30.45 as a specialist batter, with three tons.

Brendon McCullum – a Test wicketkeeper 51% of the time

52 matches as keeper, 49 as an outfielder

Just as a measure of the inaccuracy of some of our perceptions, you probably think of Brendon McCullum as both a wicketkeeper and a captain – yet he played in 100 Test matches when he wasn’t entrusted with both those roles. Captain-keeper was actually something he did just the once, against England in 2013. (Jonny Bairstow also played in that match, but didn’t keep wicket.)

> Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews: Conjoined Lord Megachiefs of Gold 2014

McCullum was captain in 31 Tests and wicketkeeper in 52. He averaged 34.18 as a stumper (five hundreds) and 42.94 as a batter (seven hundreds).

He also kept wicket in 184 one-day internationals, which gives you a pretty good idea why our perspectives can sometimes end up skewed.

Kumar Sangakkara – a Test wicketkeeper 36% of the time

48 matches as keeper, 86 as an outfielder

Jayawardene kept wicket in more Test matches than Sangakkara. That is a 100 per cent true fact that only becomes believable when we reveal that we are talking about Prasanna Jayawardene.

Even so, a surprisingly large proportion of people just didn’t seem to notice that their all-time favourite wicketkeeper-batter only actually kept wicket in a third of the Test matches he played. Granted, that was still a lot of matches, but it does mean that Sangakkara played more Test matches without the gloves than Ian Chappell, Martin Crowe, Denis Compton, Len Hutton and Michael Vaughan. Steve Smith will catch him pretty soon – but he hasn’t yet.

Sangakkara is a rare player whose reputation has been positively burnished by multitasking. Normally any attempt at all-rounderism only serves to double the criticism you attract and this is especially true for wicketkeepers, who are routinely slaughtered for dropping a catch when they’re batting well or for making a duck when their keeping is slick and polished. Sangakkara, in contrast, is falsely perceived as a man who made dozens of Test hundreds while playing as a wicketkeeper.

Don’t get us wrong – his record is extraordinary. But of his 38 Test hundreds, only seven came in matches when he was wicketkeeping. His impressive batting average as keeper (40.48) also soars to an outright ludicrous 66.78 when he played as a specialist batsman.

People think that the impressive thing about Sangakkara is that he made so many runs when he was a wicketkeeper. The far more incredible feat was just how many he made when he wasn’t.

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History is not just written by the victors. When it’s a particularly bad defeat, the losers make doubly certain to note down all the really awful moments too.

Jos Buttler made a fourth innings double ball hundred in Adelaide. In a series where England have so far displayed almost zero batting competence, he stuck around for over four hours.

Then he trod on his stumps.

We’ll all remember Jos Buttler treading on his stumps.

Buttler took a couple of tidy catches as well. But he also dropped a really easy one.

We’ll all remember Jos Buttler’s terrible drop.

All in all, Buttler dropped several catches and made a duck in the first innings and 26 runs in the second – and yet really it’s not so outlandish to suggest he had a pretty good game. That second knock was a hell of a 207 (26 runs).

What else?

In any other match, we’d probably remember Joe Root’s facial expression while witnessing the worst of those dropped catches too. But then this was also the match when England’s captain had to go for a testicle X-ray after getting hit while taking throw-downs.

Root then suffered a second ping of the swingers off Mitchell Starc later the same day.

BT Sport uploaded the delivery as one of their highlights of the day and labelled it thus.

We’ll all remember Joe Root getting hit in the nuts.

We’ll all remember Adelaide 2021.

The Ashes is still going, so we guess we’ll carry on writing about it. You can get our articles by email here.

You’re no longer allowed to write about T20 without referencing “match-ups” so that is what we’re going to do. Brace yourselves for some IN DEPTH ANALYSIS.

In the unlikely event you’re not au fait with the concept of the match-up, it’s a tactical thing where you try and pit a given batter or bowler against a specific type of opponent in each phase of a game.

At a very basic level, if a batter is shite against leg-spin then you try and bowl a leg-spinner to them. Or it can be more specific. Maybe they struggle to score against wide yorkers delivered by a left-armer from round the wicket during the powerplay. So ideally you have someone who can do that.

It becomes strategic too. If you’re up against a team with loads of right-handers, maybe you’ll want to pick more spinners who turn the ball away from the bat. But then maybe the opposition see this coming and pick a left-hander or two to disrupt the rhythm.

It can all get a bit game theory-y, but it’s an easy way to analyse what is after all a fundamentally formulaic format. The concept of match-ups therefore underpins the selection of most sides.

Identifying beneficial match-ups is a way to maximise your side’s potential and you can sometimes eke out a crucial advantage by unearthing one in some unexpected corner of the game. But then you can also win a lot of matches by having players like Jos Buttler and Adil Rashid.

There are definitely ways of using these players that are more productive, but debate about these finer points often overlooks the fact that these differences pale next to the sheer overwhelming usefulness of having these players available in the first place.

Take, for example, Jos Buttler. In the lead-up to the T20 World Cup there was much debate about whether Buttler was best used as an opener where he could potentially face more deliveries, or further down the order where he long ago proved himself a genius.

The answer is that it doesn’t matter. Well, it does matter – you would obviously get different outcomes – but there is no properly wrong answer. Buttler is a brilliant T20 opener and a brilliant T20 finisher and a brilliant T20 middle-overser. He is a brilliant T20 batter. He is a good option whatever you do with him.

Rashid too might have a better record against some types of batter than others and is used in a way to maximise his effectiveness, but the broader truth is that whenever you see fit to bowl him, he’s fantastic.

We’re not trying to rubbish or diminish the timely deployment of playing resources here. We’re just pointing out that the timeliness of deployment is sometimes of less significance than the playing resource itself.

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“I’m putting a team together for a job.”

“You son of a bitch. I’m in.”

In heist movies, whenever they put a team together, everyone’s always the best of the best; the best there’s ever been.

You never make do with members of your heist team. You never settle. You don’t pick someone who’s competent at cracking safes, you pick the best God damn safe cracker who ever lived. You don’t pick any old thief, you pick a ninja who can pick people’s pockets while hanging upside down with his eyes closed.

Test cricket teams don’t work like this because Test cricket teams are based in the real world.

When you’re picking a Test team, you’re picking the best players currently available from your nation. The players you pick might not be the best in the world. And it’s highly unlikely they’re the best there’s ever been. Sometimes you just have to hope they’re good enough.

England currently have three wicketkeepers they could credibly pick: Jos Buttler, Jonny Bairstow and Ben Foakes. Each has his strengths but each also has his weaknesses.

Because there are three of them, and because each excels in some way or other, it’s tempting to see the situation as an embarrassment of riches. But it’s not that. It’s more an embarrassment of adequacy.

Jos Buttler is probably the best limited overs batsman England have ever had. He is a pretty solid stopper behind the stumps to quick bowlers but sometimes ropey when standing up for the spinners. He can play quite brilliant Test innings and temper homogeneity in the Test team – but then he often seems paralysed by the possibilities of Test cricket and he doesn’t score consistently.

Jonny Bairstow has a case to be considered England’s best ever one-day opener. He has scored six Test hundreds. It feels like he could average 40-odd in the longest format, but he doesn’t; he keeps getting bowled. His keeping is decent, probably splitting the difference between Buttler and Foakes.

Ben Foakes has a Test hundred. He is widely considered the best wicketkeeper of the three. But England feel he is vulnerable to pace bowling with the bat and the short ball in particular. They seem to think the flaw is sufficiently glaring that they’re only willing to pick him on the slowest, lowest pitches.

So who do you pick?

Well you could pick any of them. You could pick any one of them and it probably wouldn’t actually make an enormous difference when measured across a decent length of time. For the amount that it’s discussed, it’s probably not an especially important question.

Things would differ from match to match. The specifics would change. Buttler might miss a couple of stumpings – plus a couple more that only Foakes would have tried for – but then he’d probably also give you the occasional innings no-one else would have played. Bairstow would deliver ducks and the odd angry proving-his-doubters-wrong match-winning hundred.

None of these players is perfect so it’s not really fair to measure them on that scale. Also, because there are three of them, you can pretty much guarantee that one of the other two is a better option than the incumbent in any given area. The man in possession can never really win.

Promise and potential are the missing elements here, but maybe we should consider any uplift in performance a bonus. Take the man currently in possession of the gloves, for example. If Buttler doesn’t become what you want him to, he’s still okay. He’ll do a job and probably still give you an occasional taste of the finer things. That’s something.

Or maybe England should try and build a Frankenkeeper using the best elements of each: Foakes’ glovework, Buttler’s wrists, Bairstow’s white hot passion.

“I’m putting a team together for a job.”

“You son of a bitch. I’m in.”

Jos Buttler’s main skill is making sure that when he walks out to bat he accesses being in his zone… apparently.

Because those are not our words. Those are the words of Jos Buttler himself.

According to Cricinfo, he reckons: “The main skill, and the biggest one that I do well when I’m at my best, is making sure that when I walk out to bat I access being in my zone, whether I’ve been waiting for six hours or just have a 10-minute turnaround in a T20.”

We’ve no idea how to access being in our zone, which is presumably why Jos Buttler is a hugely successful international cricketer and we are whatever the hell we are. We’re not sure we should admit this, but we don’t even know what those words mean. Not combined in that way at any rate.

Elsewhere in the interview, Buttler talks about learning to manage his energy resources to cope with all of his playing obligations. (Hopefully he’ll learn to make sure he can access his energy conservation zone before 2021 because 2021 is going to be an absolute killer for the England players.)

He also talks about doing things ‘his way,’ which lets us in on some of the latest thinking guiding the evolution of the Jos Buttler formula.

He says he’s going to, “try and do more of committing to my way, whether it’s trying to block 1,000 balls or slog 1,000 balls.”

It is not clear from his comments whether or not he is aware there are other options.

Jos Buttler is a Test batsman who talks as if he needs to approach his innings in a certain way. Maybe taking a philosophy into the middle is counterproductive.

What’s your natural game? Our natural game is a lot of tea, coffee and reading, a small amount of writing, maybe a bike ride and probably three beers late on watching something like Roadhouse, the film that taught Michael Vaughan so much.

As you’d imagine, we play our natural game basically never, which is fine, because the interruptions that prevent it make life more interesting. One of our interruptions is currently asking us to hang rubber dinosaurs off the coffee table with her, so we’re going to go and do that for a bit.

Okay, we’re back. (Not all of the dinosaurs were able to grip effectively but we were quite proud of our innovative wedging efforts that got Deinonychus to stick there. Kudos too to Parasaurolophus for using the back of his head.)

No batsman attracts the term ‘natural game’ more often than Jos Buttler. It’s used so regularly that we’ve actually written about Jos Buttler’s natural game before. And now we’re going to write about it again.

Whatever people think about Buttler in Test cricket, their position tends to revolve around his natural game. Some people say his natural game just isn’t suited to the longest format. Others say everything would be fine if he would only throw caution to the wind and play his natural game. Buttler himself seems to agree with everyone and no-one.

At the start of the year, he said that since he returned to the Test team, “I’ve tried to trust my defence for longer periods of time.”

This has been visibly true. He often seems to be wilfully refusing to so much as look at the touchpaper, let alone light it.

However, in that same interview, Buttler also said that playing his natural game, “is certainly something I’m trying to work out.”

To which one can only say: what? Your natural game is not something you try and do. It’s what happens if you don’t do anything else.

Maybe it’s all those dinosaur-dangling distractions that Test cricket is forever throwing at a batsman.

Test batting isn’t really about defence and it isn’t about being ‘liberated’ to scythe boundaries either. It’s about flip-flopping between those extremes from session to session, over to over and ball to ball. That’s the art of it and also the most difficult bit. It’s about being able to make countless good decisions and somehow doing so without ever really thinking too much.

When Ben Stokes returned to the England team after his trial for the Bristol nightclub thing, he delivered an impressively dispiriting volume of penitent batting. Against India, in particular, he seemed hellbent on playing responsibly to an almost paradoxically unproductive extent.

At Trent Bridge he made 62 off 187 balls. At the Rose Bowl he made 23 off 79 and 30 off 110. There were other examples and it did for a while seem like something we’d have to get used to. Fortunately this phase proved short-lived and transformative in a positive way as he eventually settled into using these new skills more judiciously. It was almost as if in not wanting to let his team down, he had explored the less familiar extreme of batting and added it to his toolkit.

Headingley was the example you’re probably already thinking of. Stokes made three runs off 72 balls before he hit a boundary in that innings. His last 84 runs then came from 67 balls. If those were two separate innings, there aren’t too many people who could have played either of them, let alone both. Stokes himself almost certainly wouldn’t have played the knock without having previously forced us to endure his experimental Tavaré album.

That innings was a bipolar example. More often Stokes has seen fit to operate somewhere in between, finding a nice balance between defence and attack.

That balance is not a constant. It varies from innings to innings, from one passage of play to the next. The trick is to feel the wave and ride it without eating sand like Johnny Utah.

It seems highly unlikely that Stokes arrives at the crease with some specific notion of Ben Stokes Test Batting in his head. He may have some vague plan for how he’ll start, but it will be overwhelmingly situation-dependent. In contrast, Jos Buttler gives the impression of being a Test batsman forever in search of an approach, a template or a formula.

In 2016 Buttler said: “My Test career started well and I was happy but in the Ashes I fell away. I went away from what I do well. I was worrying about how Mitchell Starc, Mitchell Johnson or Josh Hazlewood would get me out and how I would counter it, but in doing that forgot how I was going to score runs and put pressure on them, which is what I’m good at. I have to be more focussed on myself.”

When he was recalled to the Test team in 2018, having been told by the selectors that they wanted him to bat the way he does in white ball cricket, he said: “For me it’s about expressing myself, trusting my instincts and allowing that to flourish rather than fighting it. I’m not just going to go out there and slog, but I am going to try to be positive.”

At other times he has spoken about working on his defensive game and the importance of having faith in it. The comments further up about doing that while simultaneously trying to find his natural game make it sound like he’s caught between two duelling philosophies. He sounds like he’s struggling to square this circle, but really they’re just two aspects of the same thing: batting.

There is something about Jos Buttler and the way people speak to him about Test batting that implies there’s a winning philosophy; some secret to be unlocked and then all will be well for him. Yet the most significant comments are surely those he made himself after making his first (and only) Test hundred.

“It’s something I try to do is read the situation and play accordingly so it’s pleasing to know that I can do that. There will be different times that different innings are required. That’s all I try and do in cricket is try and read the situation and play as I feel like should do.

“I think it shows in Test cricket how it ebbs and flows. For twenty minutes it feels impossible and then for twenty minutes you feel like you’re in control and playing well. You can’t underestimate how much luck plays a part. Human error, dropped catch and I wouldn’t be sat here today either. So I think trying to focus in the moment and stay in your zone and your bubble and play each ball on its merit and within your game plan is all you’re trying to do, I think, for that period of time. And if that means they bowl well and you play out four maidens you’re trying to trust your defence to get through that.”

Jos Buttler should play his natural game – but he should also accept that the environment will dictate what his natural game actually is.

Jos Buttler is a man for whom trying to score runs at unbelievable speed appears to have no downside.

Normally there’s a risk associated with trying to hit every ball to the boundary, but if anything you feel that Buttler’s actually safer when he takes that approach; that playing each ball on its merits would somehow be colossally irresponsible of him.

Buttler’s second-most-amazing shot is when he plays the ball over his own head and behind the wicketkeeper. His most amazing shot is the wrist snap golf chip that somehow goes for six.

Jos Buttler is the wicketkeeper. This feels more irrelevant than it probably is.

Let us tell you about the other members of England’s World Cup squad

Remember when R Ashwin mankadded Jos Buttler? Here’s the footage.

There are two ways of looking at the incident.

(1) You look at that delivery in isolation and you try and work out whether it was a legitimate dismissal or not. Many people are doing this. Lots of the analysis begins with the word “technically” and we honestly can’t help but hear it in the voice of Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.

(2) You ask why it happened to Jos Buttler. Again.

Back in 2014, Sri Lanka’s Sachithra Senanayake made as if to mankad Buttler but pulled out of actually doing so. The message was clear: “Stop wandering halfway down the pitch before I’ve bowled the ball. You’re taking the piss.”

Buttler continued ambling down the pitch and so a few balls later Senanayake mankadded him for real.

This is what the mankad is for. It’s a deterrent. It deters batsmen from turning a 22-yard single into a 15-yard single. And to work as a deterrent, it does actually have to be deployed every once in a while.

All the same, it’s very rare. The fact that Jos Buttler has now been mankadded twice is therefore striking. As the old saying goes: Mankad me once, shame on you. Mankad me twice, shame on me.

Context

We didn’t see the lead-up to Ashwin’s mankad and most reports are rather overlooking it in favour of “technically…” But the context is surely what matters most.

Is Jos Buttler a mankad candidate? Is he quite often just asking to be mankadded?

It is rare for a mankad to come out of the blue. Ashwin himself says it was “pretty instinctive” but why was it in his head to even try it? Had he noticed Buttler wandering out of his ground before the ball was delivered a few times already and grown irritated?

If it was just a one-off move that came out of the blue, it’s not a particularly good look for Ashwin because that particular delivery wasn’t a really clear-cut case of the batsman walking miles down the pitch, smug in the knowledge that he is inexplicably protected by ‘the spirit of the game’.

It was marginal and marginal crease departures are often the times when bowlers choose to ‘warn’ batsmen. In short, if you’re going to mankad someone, you’re probably going to get shit for it, so at least try and pick a moment when it’s really clear cut.

If it wasn’t a one-off move that came out of the blue, we’re a lot more sympathetic to Ashwin and a lot less sympathetic to Buttler. Sure, on this particular delivery the batsman didn’t seem to have committed any major piss-takery, but if he’d left his crease early a few times leading up to his dismissal then that’s cheating and tough shit.

But like we say, we didn’t see the context. All we can do is ask the question again: Is Jos Buttler quite often just asking to be mankadded?

Jos Buttler hits a great many sixes and a proportion of them are delivered via a mad wrist snap. The mad wrist snap is what we’re writing about today.

For some in cricket – most of whom are commentators and several of whom are perhaps mildly racist – ‘wristiness’ is a quality that is unique to Asian batsmen.

This is odd because when we think about wristy shots, quite a few of the examples that immediately come to our mind were played by England batsmen. Think of Kevin Pietersen’s manipulated work-to-leg to get off strike or Eoin Morgan’s what-the-hell-was-that-supposed-to-be.

Think also of about half the shots played by Jos Buttler. Where Chris Gayle swings from the torso, a Buttler wallop ripples down through every joint, culminating in an almost Murali-level snap of the wrists. It’s a movement from another sport – maybe badminton, or squash. (Probably golf if we’re honest, but let’s not start writing about golf. A man’s got to have some standards and that’s one of ours. (We have eight standards in total.))

We’d actually go so far as to say that Buttler is the wristiest batsman we’ve seen. Maybe he should change his name to Josananda Buttlerweera so that all the generalisers can more easily come to terms with his style of play.

It’s not easy to get a sense of what he does from a photo, but look at his bat in this shot and then look at where the ball is.

The ball was dispatched through midwicket. Just think about what his wrists had to do for that to happen. Madness.

This is the essence of the Buttler wrist snap. It starts with a ludicrous wrists-cocked backlift and ends with a ludicrous wrists-cocked follow-through. In the nanosecond between those two positions, bat strikes ball – usually quite hard.