For someone who really hasn’t had the smoothest of sailings in white ball cricket for much of the last year and as a matter of fact, has dealt with more ill luck and loss of form than progress, 2024, it finally seems is going to be Jos Buttler’s year.
Not called the boss for nothing, a nickname that has stuck on for he can subject the cricket ball to great brutality, Jos Buttler, if you’d come to note some of his recent innings, is finally getting into the groove.
This augurs well not just for his present Rajasthan Royals camp, a team that’s been playing the IPL 2024 in true Royal fashion, it signals bright optimism for the England national team gearing up for the 2024 T20 World Cup.
When Jos Buttler single handedly silenced Kolkata
Just last evening, i.e., April 16, Buttler brought a cliffhanger against the mighty Kolkata Knight Riders right down to the wire. It’s one thing to defeat the KKR in an IPL contest; that Buttler pretty much did the winning job on his own was icing on the cake and evidence of real hammering the KKR bowlers were subjected to.
In winning a sheer nail-biter with nothing but a tail-ender in Avesh Khan, Jos Buttler glittered amid possible gloom given the Shreyas Iyer side was coming real hard at his RR unit.
That a final ball victory actually came at the Eden Gardens, hence the home turf for hosts Kolkata Knight Riders, pointed to Buttler’s prowess in playing away from the royal home comfort of Jaipur, Rajasthan.
He didn’t just smash a ton; he scored 107 of Rajasthan’s 224 runs on his own. Taking merely 60 deliveries to notch up a sublime century, Buttler held aloft the hopes of a team that may have perhaps given all up when the in-form Riyan Parag, who’s been quite a revelation this season, lofted an airy shot straight into the hands of the outfielder Andre Russell.
Physically drained out, quite a visible sight that wasn’t too hard to evade, coupled with the evident difficulty in running the hard yards in completing the ones and twos, Jos Buttler toiled hard when the rest gave up.
If you think of the overall impact of Buttler’s impactful inning, you’d note the consistency with which he smashed the bowlers; combining a sense of purpose to power, not letting the love for going big overpower the ambition of winning the game for his Rajathan Royals.
His incredible strike rate of 178 notwithstanding, there was purpose to way Jos Buttler paced his inning. In the second and final spell of the often hard-to-score-off Sunil Narine, Buttler evaded the big shots and kept the usual flamboyant tempo in check. He simply watched the ball.
He didn’t even go bonkers against the usual wicket-taking Varun Chakaravarthy.
The hard yards done well, he expanded his envelope of scoring when it came to Harshit Rana. A six, followed by a four and six in the medium pacer’s last over upped the ante of scoring especially when Rajasthan Royals were feeling the heat.
But there’s some daredevilry to Buttler’s fascinating Kolkata-bound three figure mark. Besides the very fact that all he took were just ten odd overs in which to register a top knock, this latest century followed in the footsteps of yet another silvery batting effort that he had produced a little over week ago.
Finding form very recently
Right before his single digit outing against the Titans that yielded just 8 runs, Buttler had produced his maiden century of the current IPL campaign.
Mighty effective and equally unsparing in the outing against the Royal Challengers Bangalore, Jos Buttler produced a magical unbeaten 100* that came off just 9.4 overs.
In what was a perfect counterattacking response to King Kohli’s dogged 113 that set the perfect tempo to that contest, Jos Buttler found importantly when the going got tough.
Never easy to outscore and outperform mega stylish dashers of the cricket ball in the form of someone like Sanju Samson- is it?
However, the sudden rediscovery of glowing form, important and timely that it may be, has had a recent past bellied with sheer underwhelming returns with the bat. Prior to his first century of IPL 2024, Buttler only had lukewarm scores like 13 and 11 against his name.
As the mega T20 series approaches its halfway stage, a tall and very likeable hitter of the cricket ball is finding form and most importantly, getting to do the bulwark of his team’s scoring, an honour hitherto nearly single handedly resting with Parag.
Catching up with the King
In the process of firing his seventh IPL century, which is no lame feat, Jos Buttler, currently bossing the bowlers, is etching his name next to a true blue king of batting. That man called Virat Kohli.
But truth be told, even the lord of batting wouldn’t the boss of batting playing catch up, would you, Virat?