As he reflected on his epic individual contribution to a thrilling and historic win for England against South Africa on Friday, Phil Salt spoke about being inspired to ever greater heights by the people around him. “The mentality that we’ve had from when I started playing for England to now, we’re always trying to push things forward,” he said. “Always trying to take, you know, the next step in the game.”
But over the past few years most of the steps taken by the white-ball side have been backwards. It is the Test team under Ben Stokes that has produced the thrills, while in shorter formats there has been a succession of spills. Jos Buttler, by general acclamation England’s greatest short-format player, stood down as captain in February after three years that started with victory in the 2022 T20 World Cup but came to be characterised by failure.
Buttler, however, is now adding fresh gloss to his reputation, and across the past week has looked in brilliant touch in scoring a 32-ball 62 in England’s one-day international romp against South Africa in Southampton, being the only English batter to flourish in the abbreviated five-over thrashfest that launched the T20 series in Cardiff, and again at Old Trafford on Friday night, where he and Salt joyfully and emphatically reclaimed the opening berths.
With Salt on paternity leave and Buttler at No 3, Jamie Smith and Ben Duckett opened during the T20 series against West Indies in June. But with a breathless summer behind them and a hectic winter ahead both were rested for these games, and in their absence Salt and Buttler have reunited to make the idea of picking anyone else appear absurd.
That Buttler dominates the list of England’s most-successful T20 opening partnerships is no surprise, but the fact that he and Salt have been so productive as a pairing perhaps is. In 17 innings together they have scored 967 runs, precisely one short of the total Buttler and Jason Roy accumulated in 31, at an average of 60.43.
Of all opening pairings with at least 15 outings over the past decade, none in world cricket comes close to matching them, the only other couple averaging above 47 being Afghanistan’s Ibrahim Zadran and Rahmanullah Gurbaz on 53.86. No other representatives of Test-playing nations get within sniffing distance of their run rate of 10.52.
“We bounce off each other well,” Salt said. “We’ve got pretty set roles – it’s my job to get us off to as good a start as possible and give Jos the opportunity to take a couple of balls, because when he does he goes on and gets a match-winning score a lot of the time. We don’t often need to communicate out there. When he needs to get me on [strike], it just happens. And when I need to get him on. There’s no ego or anything like that, we just do it, and I think that’s a massive part of having a good opening partnership.”
It was Salt who produced England’s greatest T20 score with 141 on Friday, his fourth century in the format (Buttler has only one, in more than three times as many innings). But there are many ways in which the former captain has assisted Salt’s success. The way they work together at the crease is the most obvious, but Buttler was also the inspiration and the challenge that pushed Salt to focus in particular on attacking the first over, something he now does better than any batter in the world.
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“In order to knock a man out of possession, you need to do something they can’t do,” Salt said. “I thought, right, if I can be the most dangerous in the first six, 10, 15 balls of the game, that’s quite a unique tool. I’m someone who’s always looking at ways to get better. The goal is to be right up there. I want to be the best in the world at this.”
Perhaps England can now rationally nurse that same goal, with another World Cup to be played in India and Sri Lanka in February. But first Sunday’s series decider at Trent Bridge, and the challenge of proving that Friday was more than a glorious anomaly.
