Brendon McCullum’s shades-on, feet-up, perpetually chilled persona as England coach, which has led to him being criticised for creating an unhealthily relaxed team culture, is carefully cultivated but entirely false, according to the former white-ball captain Jos Buttler. Buttler said that McCullum is actually “as sharp a coach as I’ve ever worked with”, and that “everyone in the dressing room knows the truth”.
While McCullum has been sceptical about the overuse of data in cricket he has recently adopted the use of walkie-talkies to relay information from the team’s analysts to their support staff and on to the pitch during matches, and Buttler insisted he has always been more involved in the action than it appears.
“That’s obviously the energy he wants to have, to allow guys to feel less pressure in a game that has a lot of pressure,” Buttler said. “So that image is important to him. But don’t mistake that for someone whose mind is relaxed and who’s not got his finger on the pulse. There is stuff that goes on behind closed doors that you guys aren’t party to. You have to make a judgment from what you see. Everyone in the dressing 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 team for the second game of their T20 World Cup campaign, against West Indies in Mumbai on Wednesday. Adil Rashid and Jofra Archer have been backed to come good after disappointing displays against Nepal in their opener, but Luke Wood has paid the price for an error-strewn final over and lost his place to Jamie Overton.
The 19 runs Rashid conceded in the 14th over of Nepal’s chase made it the joint 10th most expensive of his 19-year, 138-game international Twenty20 career. Archer meanwhile bowled the single most expensive over of the game, his last, which brought one wicket, two wides, three sixes and 22 runs in all and during which the chances of Nepalese victory according to statistical modelling rocketed from 20.25% just before his first delivery to 60.66% after his last.
Wood’s final over immediately followed it: he bowled three wides, conceded 14 runs, and bumped Nepal’s victory chances up to 79.7%, before Sam Curran turned the tide in the 40th over of the match to secure English victory by a four-run margin.
But Buttler said that the experience Rashid and Archer can call on would make it “pretty easy” for them to come back from a bruising outing for a key game in Group C. West Indies also won their first match, and whoever prevails would take a giant stride towards qualifying for the Super Eights with two group games still to play.
“We’re all accepting of how T20 cricket works,” Buttler said. “The batters are going to come after you and be aggressive. Experienced players, talking about Jofra and Adil, have seen it all before. They’re not immune to people playing well against them. That’s allowed. We try our best and want to perform really well, but every other country and every other player that we play against is wanting to do the same. That’s T20 cricket. You start again tomorrow, nought for nought, and it’s a new game.”
With Overton’s return the team to face West Indies contains seven of the XI who were thrashed at the Wankhede last February in the final game of England’s white-ball tour of India, their last bilateral series under Buttler’s captaincy. But there has been a shift in the side’s balance in the past 12 months, notably with the adoption of a second specialist spinner in Liam Dawson.
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Pakistan warmed up for their blockbuster T20 World Cup clash against India with a 32-run win against USA on Tuesday then declared they were “confident” of taking down their bitter rivals.
The Group A win was a boost for Pakistan before the high-octane clash with the defending champions in Colombo on Sunday, now back on after the Islamabad government called off a boycott 24 hours previously.
The opener Sahibzada Farhan, who top-scored with 73, said: “The match is on and we are in a confident mood.”
Pakistan have a dismal record against India in International Cricket Council tournaments, winning only once in eight encounters in T20 World Cups and have lost all eight times that the sides have met in the 50-over World Cup.
In the T20 Asian Cup last year, India beat Pakistan three times on their way to lifting the trophy in Dubai.
The spinner Tariq Usman, who took three for 27 against USA, said those stats did not bother him. “We used to beat India in the 1990s and before so don’t count the recent record or only the ICC event record, we used to win against them frequently,” he said.
Farhan promised: “This time it will be different and we will give a strong performance. We lost all three matches including the final to India in the Asia Cup but they were not one-sided.”
Farhan said two wins out of two in the World Cup, the first was against the Netherlands on Saturday, had kick-started Pakistan’s campaign.
Pakistan came into the tournament having beaten Australia 3-0 in a home T20 series and Fargan said the mood around the camp was very positive.
“Wins always give you confidence and we will take this confidence into Sunday’s game and we assure you we will be a better side come Sunday,” he said.
India will face a second Group A match against Namibia on Thursday in New Delhi before flying to Sri Lanka. It means a quick turnaround for the match on Sunday, the biggest and most lucrative clash in world cricket.
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“There were definitely learnings from that series,” Buttler said. “I would say we attacked with pace a lot in that tour. We had some exceptionally fast bowlers – Mark Wood, Jofra, Brydon Carse was there – but it’s clear that pace isn’t the only answer.
“I just look at the side we have at the moment, there’s a nicely balanced bowling attack. If you need a lot of spin, there’s a lot of spin overs in the group. If you need pace, it’s there. If you need nous 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 pace.”