Jos Buttler, who played an instrumental figure in England’s maiden World Cup haul, revealed that he would have stopped playing cricket if his side had failed to win the showpiece event.
“What was scaring me was if we lost, I didn’t know how I’d play cricket again. This was such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a World Cup final at Lord’s. It felt like destiny and I was thinking: ‘If it doesn’t happen, I will have no motivation to pick up a cricket bat for a very long time,'” Buttler said during an interaction with Daily Mail.
“Before the India game, I was struggling with coming to terms with the prospect of us getting knocked out. We’d been favourites, so highly fancied by everyone, and there was the danger that four years of playing such good cricket was going to come to nothing,” the wicketkeeper-batsman said.
“Think about what people will say about us as a team, think about how they will call us chokers, everything else they will say. I remember seeing a comment – maybe it was the one that got Jonny Bairstow wound up – about how it would be the biggest failure because of how much had gone into this World Cup. I was struggling with the thought of that.”
Buttler also lamented about reaching eight finals and ending up as runners-up. He said watching the opposition lift the trophy is always painful and he didn’t want to experience it again.
“I had played in eight finals before Sunday and lost seven of them. I’d played in lots with Somerset, the Champions Trophy with England and when we lost the T20 in Kolkata and I knew how much it hurt watching the other team lift the trophy. I didn’t want to feel that pain and that regret again.”
