.os Butler stands in front of the hotel room door and bounces the ball against the bat. Trent Boult opens the door carrying a guitar, which he plays as they leave together. Butler plays a game in which the goal is to throw nuts and berries in your partner’s mouth, Butler holds the left-handed opener Jashasvi Jaiswala with a baby in his arms and says, “Yes, yes, come in, buddy,” with a surprising degree of tenderness.
Butler sits on a chair while Ravichandran Ashwin describes his earliest memories of cricket: a huge tree where, as a very young child, he was left alone with his bag from a motorcycle driven by his father, a tree he still visits when he can.
These are videos about Butler on the YouTube channel Rajasthan Royals, nine of them in the last two weeks alone, and they are really good. The boult / guitar / hotel one has 1.8 million views to date. To give a sense of scope, to stare for a moment at the night sky of Indian cricket and feel how small you really are, this is a hundred times more than the ECB’s Ben Stokes, exclusive on its channel.
Butler’s real exhibit is a number like Jos: Mi Stori, with soft-focus footage sadly talking about losing his place on the English test, and then laughing, hugging and being born again with his teammates from the Royal Team - “It’s a feeling, people around you ”- all the time it looks, as always, as if the most handsome and sympathetic golden retriever in the world has somehow learned to stand on its hind legs and play a helicopter-whip strike.
“I’m Jos Buttler, the opener for the Rajasthan Royals,” he says at one point, and looking at all this, think, “Yes, it really is.” Butler has played 44 games for the Royals in the past three and a half years, the most for any team in any format, and 43 more than he won in the district championship. For a month in the English season, he was brilliantly armed to promote and decorate his de facto cricket home, the Indian Jewel Cricket Control Committee, the biggest event in the sports calendar.
And this is all good, correct and quite appropriate, not to say instructive. First, because it’s just a nice moment for Butler. It is worth noting the changed dynamics. By any old school metrics, Butler looked like a falling cricketer after dropping out of England: blown away, snooker, limited to the endless things-we-do-with-Jos. Ten weeks later, he is instead the biggest star in world cricket.
Butler was a kind of master of the tournament at this IPL, with 824 runs at 58.86, miles away from the chase, with a maximum of sixes, fours, hundreds. What catches your eye when you look at him is his calmness. Butler really only moves his hands these days, letting the cacophony overwhelm him, believing the brilliance of those brutal hands that twitch quickly. This is a man who reaches to the edges of his own talent and above all finds a scene.
𝗙𝗢𝗨𝗥 100s in an IPL season for Jos Buttler! 🤩⚡
And 𝗪𝗛𝗔𝗧 𝗔 𝗪𝗔𝗬 to send the Rajasthan Royals through to the #IPL final! 💥 pic.twitter.com/9BpygFDfdu
— Sky Sports Cricket (@SkyCricket) May 27, 2022
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𝗙𝗢𝗨𝗥 100 in IPL season for Jos Butler! 🤩⚡
And 𝗪𝗛𝗔𝗧 𝗔 𝗪𝗔𝗬 to send the royal family of Rajasthan to # IPL final! 💥 pic.tvitter.com / 9BpigFDfdu
- Ski Sports Cricket (@ SkiCricket) May 27, 2022
This is the second point. Above all, it would be a really good time for English cricket to understand IPL a little better, not only to let its players go, seeing this thing as a problem to manage, but also to understand why IPL works, what the source of that energy is.
One game remains to be played, the weekly final between Butler’s team and the Gujarat Titans in Ahmedabad in front of about 100,000 people, it is said. And since this thing has narrowed down to the point, what really stands out is the astonishing quality of cricket.
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In his early years, the IPL often got a little baggy and vague, sweaty legends in lycra hugging in the stomach, dancers on the podium pushing in the groin, the same substance stretched thinly across the endless, interchangeable stage. Not so here. Just look at the little kick, that beautiful feeling of stubborn orthodoxy behind the power game of this generation of players. Watching Sanja Sanson drive the ball over the shelter, elbow ballet bent, bat’s face gleaming, arms outstretched with exciting modern exuberance, there is a sense that this thing has been raised to other levels, other speeds, an entity with a life of its own.
This is a real lesson to be learned from the IPL. In England, there is still a tendency to see a dazzling and inauthentic money-making machine, to connect with all the things from the six-hit day with the super powerful Primula cheese, the screaming, naked trade. And yes, IPL is expected to earn £ 1.5 billion this year, three times the ECB’s total annual turnover.
But look away from the money and the point of the IPL is that it is authentic. He expresses and reflects a culture that is simply bright, energetic and confident, visibly nationalistic, just as baseball in the last century captured America’s sense of being a young and energetic country, a place that needs legends, shows, self-mythologizing theater.
IPL is making its stars these days; it has become a kind of dream factory for someone like Umran Malik, who came out of nowhere at the age of 22 and is now a ball at 97 miles per hour in front of a billion people. There is a mentality here and a feeling that he is saying something to the culture that surrounds him.
What part of England’s own sports culture reflects the ECB’s attempt to emulate this Hundred? Greed? Recklessness? Removing property?
What IPL tells us is that it is a way to build something new to find what was, to reflect and glorify culture, to find a part that is real and to have roots. Unable to see the past of branding and noise, managed by insufficiently qualified traders, English cricket instead devised the most plastic tournament imaginable, targeting only dollars, T-shirts and logos. Watch the IPL, watch Butler, feel the life in this thing. There are lessons to be learned here.