Jos Buttler insists ‘the dressing room knows the truth’ about McCullum’s qualities

Brendon McCullum’s shady, perpetually chilled personality as England coach, which has led to him being criticized for creating an unhealthy relaxed team culture, is carefully cultivated but completely false, according to former white-ball captain Jos Buttler. Buttler said McCullum is actually “as sharp a coach as I’ve ever worked with”, and that “everyone in the dressing room knows the truth”.

Although skeptical of the overuse of data in cricket, McCullum has recently adopted the use of walkie-talkies to relay information from the team’s analysts to their support staff and on the field during matches. Buttler insisted he has always been more involved in the action than it seems.

“That’s obviously the energy he wants to have so that guys feel less pressure in a high-pressure game,” Buttler said. “So that image is important to him. But don’t confuse that with someone whose mind is relaxed and who doesn’t have his finger on the pulse. Things happen behind closed doors that you are not a party to. You have to make a judgment based on what you see. Everyone in the locker room knows the truth.”

“Baz can sit with his feet up and sunglasses on and look very relaxed, but he’s as sharp a coach as I’ve ever worked with. He doesn’t miss a beat.”

England have named their squad for the second match of their T20 World Cup campaign against West Indies in Mumbai on Wednesday. Adil Rashid and Jofra Archer have been backed to perform well after disappointing performances against Nepal in their opener, but Luke Wood paid the price for a mistake-riddled final and lost his place to Jamie Overton.

The 19 runs conceded by Rashid in the 14th over of Nepal’s chase made it the 10th most expensive of his 19-year, 138-match international T20 career. Archer, meanwhile, bowled the most expensive over of the game, his last, which yielded a total of one wicket, two wides, three sixes and 22 runs and in which the chances of Nepal’s victory according to statistical modeling shot up from 20.25% just before his first delivery to 60.66% after his last.

Wood’s final over immediately followed, bowling three wides, conceding 14 runs and increasing Nepal’s chances of victory to 79.7%, before Sam Curran turned the tide in the 40th over of the match to secure England’s victory by a four-run margin.

But Buttler said the experience that both Rashid and Archer can call on would make it “pretty easy” for them to bounce back from a cracking outing for what is a key match in Group C. West Indies also won their first match, and whoever wins would take a big step towards qualifying for the Super Eights with two group matches left to play.

“We all accept how T20 cricket works,” Buttler said. “The batters come after you and they are aggressive. Experienced players, speaking of Jofra and Adil, have seen it all before. They are not immune to people playing well against them. That’s allowed. We do our best and want to perform really well, but every other country and every other player we play against wants to do the same. That’s T20 cricket. Tomorrow you start again, for nothing, and it’s a new game.”

With Overton’s return, the West Indies squad includes seven of the XI defeated at Wankhede last February in the final match of England’s white-ball tour of India, their last bilateral series under Buttler’s captaincy. But there has been a shift in the balance of the squad over the past 12 months, most notably with the adoption of a second specialist spinner in Liam Dawson.

“There were definitely lessons learned from that series,” Buttler said. “I would say we attacked with pace a lot on that tour. We had some exceptionally fast bowlers – Mark Wood, Jofra and Brydon Carse were there – but clearly pace is not the only answer.

“I just look at the side we have at the moment, there’s a nice balanced bowling attack. If you need a lot of spin, there’s a lot of spin overs in the group. If you need speed, it’s there. If you need knowledge and skill and slower balls, it’s there. I think that’s a really nice, balanced attack, not just trying to blow teams away with speed.”