Jos Buttler’s carefree mantra helping him bridge the widening gap between red and white-ball cricket

During a mid-session break on the Sunday morning of the Headingley Test, Jos Buttler put his bat and gloves on the ground in order to have a drink. An eagle-lensed Sky Sports cameraman homed in on Buttler’s bat, and unwittingly revealed to the world the self-help message daubed on the end of the handle. “F*** IT,” it read. A startled director swiftly cut to another shot.

So, in a sense, did Buttler. During his match-winning unbeaten 80 during the second Test against Pakistan, what was most notable was the way he slipped from role to role like a character actor. In a sense, he played four innings in one – bullish when he first came in, stoically watchful against the new ball before stumps, cautiously enterprising the following morning, and then utterly brutal at the end, striking 35 off his last 11 balls. Had he not run out of partners, he would have been nailed on for a maiden Test century.

And so Buttler has begun his second Test career in rather similar fashion to his first. Almost three years after he was first dropped from the side, casting him into a white-ball wilderness from which few dreamed he would ever escape, Buttler’s return seems to have given this pained and ailing England side what it so desperately needed: a touch of genius, a positive mindset, a bullish aggression that seizes the initiative and fears nobody. In the space of two Tests, Buttler has helped England relocate their “f*** it” mentality.

For Buttler himself, of course, there is a lot more to the mantra than first meets the eye. It is something he has been writing on the end of his bat handles for some years now, which has occasionally caused him some grief when giving them away for charity. And it is not merely a licence to go for his shots, but an entire attitude: an entreaty to himself to live as he plays. For Buttler, “f*** it” is a way of living.

“It’s just something that reminds me of what my best mindset is,” he says. “When I’m playing cricket – and probably in life as well. It puts cricket in perspective. When you nick off, does it really matter? It’s just a good reminder when I’m in the middle, when I’m questioning myself, and it brings me back to a good place.”

For a player of such bone-crushing, supernatural talent, Buttler is a curiously philosophical character away from the crease: softly-spoken, thoughtful and given to occasional bouts of melancholy, even self-doubt. Those around the England camp say that even Buttler himself has only a partial idea of just how good he is. And that is reflected when The Independent asks him whether his experience of playing Twenty20 – with its wild fluctuations and all-or-nothing mentality – has helped him cope with failure as a batsman.

“To an extent,” he says. “In T20, you’re almost set up to fail a lot of the time, especially if you’re batting in the middle order. The tough thing with Test cricket is that if you get out early, you’ve got a long time to think about it. You guys have got to write something, the Sky commentators have got to fill time, and they can pick you to pieces. In cricket, you fail in your own head maybe seven or eight times out of 10. Even guys who get 50 always feel they should have gone on. The way cricket works, you’re always dealing with failure, which is a tough game to master mentally.”

It was the mental game that did for Buttler’s Test career first time around. Having stormed into the Test side in the summer of 2014 with 85 off 83 balls on debut against India – a score he is yet to improve on – by the following summer, his confidence in the longest format had gently eroded. He had a poor Ashes in 2015, could scarcely buy a run in the United Arab Emirates a few months later, and to his own palpable and surprising relief, was dropped after that.

“I started to think too much about how to not get out, as opposed to how to score runs,” he admits now. “I got in a really bad rut that I just couldn’t get out of. The only real way to get out of it was to be dropped. And actually, being dropped released a lot of pressure. Actually, it wasn’t very long after that that I had a hundred in Dubai [off 46 balls, England’s fastest-ever international century], which was a turnaround for me after a long and hard six months.”

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Now, Buttler has two months of white-ball cricket coming up, against Australia and India, and despite his rich run of form in the recent Test series, this might be no bad thing. Buttler is at his best when he has little time to dwell, which is why the quick churn of franchised T20 suits him well. “Those couple of weeks in the IPL gave me huge amounts of confidence,” he says. “For me, not trying to worry about the colour of the ball definitely helps.”

There is a growing school of thought within cricket that its red and white-ball strains are increasingly insoluble, and destined to grow apart over time. That the evolution of limited-overs batting is increasingly inconsistent with the patience and restraint required to build a Test career. That the draining nature of international and domestic schedules will ultimately make it impossible to play at the highest level in all three formats.

That Buttler is swimming against the tide, wearing out his body, condemning himself to an unsatisfying compromise and setting himself up for a fall. Then again, he’s just averaged 81 in a Test series with a strike rate of 63, having barely hit a red ball for months. Sometimes, you just have to say: f*** it.