IPL and Jos Buttler show ECB how to make cricket work as entertainment

Jos Buttler stands outside a hotel room door bouncing a ball on his bat. Trent Boult opens the door carrying a guitar, which he strums as they stroll off together. Buttler plays a game where the object is to throw nuts and berries into your partner’s mouth, Buttler cradling the baby-faced left-handed opener Yashasvi Jaiswal in his arms and saying: “Yes, yes, get in there mate,” with a surprising degree of tenderness.

Buttler sits on a stool as Ravichandran Ashwin describes his earliest memory of cricket: an enormous tree where, as a very young child, he was dropped off alone with his kitbag from a motorbike driven by his father, a tree he still revisits when he can.

These are the Buttler-themed videos on the Rajasthan Royals YouTube channel, nine of them in the past two weeks alone, and they’re genuinely good. The Boult/guitar/hotel one has 1.8m views to date. To give a sense of scale, to stare for a moment into the night sky of Indian cricket and feel just how small you really are, this is a hundred times more than the ECB’s Ben Stokes captaincy exclusive over on its own channel.

Buttler’s real showpiece is a Jos: My Story-type number, with soft-focus shots of him talking sadly about losing his England Test spot, then laughing, hugging and being reborn with his Royals teammates – “It’s the feeling, the people around you” – all the while looking, as ever, as if the world’s most handsome and lovable cartoon golden retriever has somehow learned to stand on its hind legs and play the check-slog helicopter-whip shot.

“I’m Jos Buttler, opener for Rajasthan Royals,” he says at one point and, watching all this, you think: “Yes, you really are.” Buttler has played 44 games for the Royals in the past three and a half years, his