After a horrendous campaign with the bat at the T20 World Cup 2026, former England captain and one of England’s finest white-ball batters, Jos Buttler, remains hopeful that he still has some spark left in him and that his international career is not yet over. Buttler was out of form during the entire tournament in India and Sri Lanka, managing just 87 runs in eight innings, which includes five single-digit scores. The wicket-keeper batter has only a single half-century to show from his last four ICC events.
However, a bona fide match-winner for England, Buttler, still has another 1.5 years left to run on his ECB central contract. He stated that he still hopes to be in the thick of things when England face India in five T20Is and three ODIs during their home summer.
“I hope so. I don’t know. Obviously, I had a poor tournament, which is disappointing, but I’ve been playing some of the best cricket of my career in recent years, so hopefully, I can get back to playing my best,” Buttler said on his podcast, For the Love of Cricket.
Buttler said he has ambitions to continue playing for England but does not want to lead the side. England have moved on from Buttler, handing the white-ball captaincy to the flamboyant Harry Brook. “I certainly have ambitions (to continue playing for England), but no longer being a captain, I’m not a selector or anything… so what will be, will be. Yeah, we will see,” said Buttler.
Buttler said he hopes that time away after the World Cup, “up the mountains” in France with his family, will leave him feeling refreshed. “I couldn’t have been further away from cricket, which for me at the time was just perfect. It is exactly what I needed,” he said.
“Obviously, the tournament didn’t go personally how I would have liked it to go, and I just felt like I needed some space from cricket and not to think about the game. I could not have been further away from cricket where I was in that week.”
The 35-year-old will feature for the in the upcoming Indian Premier League and said he is utilising the time now to reflect on his cricket and why certain things didn’t go as planned. He said, “It was really refreshing, I really enjoyed it, a complete sort of release. Slowly but surely, I would say at the start of this week, I am just starting to reflect a bit and have a few thoughts about what is important to me and my cricket, and why it probably didn’t go quite as I would’ve liked. There are elements that I actually don’t really know exactly. For all your best intentions and hard work and efforts to perform, it just didn’t work, and sometimes that is OK as well. That is something I have had to realise. It wasn’t for a lack of effort; it just didn’t quite happen.”
