Buttler encourages England to move past 50-over World Cup disappointment

England captain, Jos Buttler, has urged his team to forget the disappointment of their failed 50-over World Cup defense and focus on keeping their T20 World Cup title, which they won in Australia two years ago. 

Speaking in an interview with Sky Sports, Buttler stressed that their poor performance in India before Christmas wasn’t just due to a "lack of clarity" from the team’s management.

"The big learning for me is to try not to confuse freedom with maybe a lack of clarity. Sometimes you're trying to let players play with freedom and you don't want to step in too much. But you have to make sure you don't miss things," Buttler said.

"Maybe [there could have been] more communication at times, to make sure people are clear on what is needed from them. But certainly there are times where I look back and say I'd probably make similar decisions in certain instances, and for whatever reason, they just don't work out," he further added.

Buttler acknowledged that despite any possible confusion, the team should have performed better, emphasizing that it's easy to critique decisions in hindsight but the bottom line was their poor play.

"Even if there was a lack of clarity, or whatever you want to call it, I'd still expect us to perform better than we did. It's easy to look at results and say there are certain things you would do differently or say differently. We just didn't play well enough," Buttler stated.

Lastly, he admitted the World Cup was a major disappointment that hurt their pride and confidence, but he expressed excitement for the new opportunity presented by the upcoming T20 World Cup.

"It's a chapter in the book, it was obviously a really disappointing World Cup and your pride and confidence gets dented a bit, but time moves on, and this a really exciting opportunity now with this World Cup coming up," he concluded.

It is worth noting that England was one of the favorites for the 2023 World Cup but lost six of their first seven games. These losses included a heavy nine-wicket defeat to New Zealand in the opening match, a shocking loss to Afghanistan, and a record 229-run defeat to South Africa. They lost seven out of ten matches in total, but late wins against the Netherlands and Pakistan saved them from the embarrassment of having to pre-qualify for the 2027 Champions Trophy.