It was the third ball he faced on Tuesday, a nothing ball really but one which he turned into a something ball. Shoaib Malik delivered it, from round the wicket. Jos Buttler was on zero then.
Until that moment his scores on the tour, over about six weeks, had read one, eight, 23, four, zero, seven, 38, one and 11. If possible, he looked worse. Here he was on nothing, mind comprehensively scrambled by weeks of spin, and he advanced down the pitch.
The way things had gone, it was only appropriate that he yorked himself and turned that nothing delivery into something. He missed it and found himself stranded. But, fortune: first in the ball somehow bouncing just over the stumps.
Then, the second as Sarfraz Ahmed fumbled the take (a worryingly regular occurrence, exclusively to spin). Many years from now, if things go well, Buttler might look back at this moment and wonder: What if he had been stumped for a duck?
England may well have persisted with him but what shape would it have left his batting in at that moment? Maybe another couple of failures here, then Dale Steyn in South Africa and, well, that would not be easy.
Every career, every life, is full of these moments. Mostly they become relevant only in hindsight.
Nobody can say yet whether or not Buttler will go on to fulfill that immense potential but had he not had that escape on Tuesday night and not subsequently made an important 49, would we have witnessed what he did on Friday evening?
By the time he came in, three balls into the 36th over, the story of England’s innings already seemed set and it was a pretty good one. They were already plenty for very few (194-2). Jason Roy was the early bird, a smooth first ODI hundred. Joe Root was being Joe Root, and so good it was easy to not even comprehend how good.
So with less than 14 overs to go, how much could Buttler really do? Even if he was a different, Buttler who walked out to the one who would have had he been stumped that night?
Well, he ended up rendering all that had gone before him absolutely irrelevant.
England’s innings until then had been pleasingly modern: sound foundation, aggressive intent, momentum never flagging, good running.
The innings after Buttler’s arrival was brutal post-modernism (it was not England’s anything as much as it was Buttler’s: he made 116 of the 161 England added), a world designed by AB de Villiers.
No shot was more of this new world than the reverse-whatever-it-was over point off Anwar Ali, in the 46th over. It was not so much the shot itself, though that was impressive. He had picked up a length ball from leg stump, without having moved his feet a millimetre.
But it was the casualness with which he played it, to the point that it was dismissive.
It was almost as if the bowler did not exist, that Buttler was merely carrying out a function he was obliged to – like celebrities on a red carpet who wave at their fans but do not really notice they are there.
There was another three overs later, off Anwar again, but six this time. A decade ago, and to the majority of current batsmen, a ball so full, outside off, would not have been scooped up as it was down the ground.
There was too much else to marvel at, as much, in fact, as the records broken. He comfortably beat his own for the fastest hundreds for England, this one coming in 46 balls only. The most telling one is that it was the second time he had scored a hundred after coming in to bat past the innings’ halfway mark.
De Villiers scored one this year having arrived as late as the 39th over and only de Villiers has done it more often (five times). Buttler’s 36th-over entry is the second-latest.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
FOLLOW US ON TWITTER @NatSportUAE
