Buttler Passes Pollard: 51 Off 20 Balls, and T20 Cricket Has a New Leading Run Scorer
Jos Buttler went to the top of T20 cricket's all time run list in Manchester on Wednesday, and he got there in 224 fewer matches than the man he passed. Our own ball-by-ball data explains how: he reaches fifty roughly once every four innings, against a field average of once in eleven.
It took him 20 balls. Two fours, six sixes, 51 not out, and by the time Manchester Super Giants had finished chasing 156 against Welsh Fire on 5 August, Jos Buttler was the leading run scorer in the history of Twenty20 cricket.
The milestone
Buttler now has 14,833 T20 runs from 522 matches, passing Kieron Pollard, who made 14,803 in 746. Chris Gayle sits third on 14,562 from 463.
Read those match counts again, because they are the story. Buttler needed 224 fewer matches than Pollard to pass him. Nobody has scored T20 runs at that combination of volume and speed.
The innings itself
Welsh Fire made 155 for 4, built on Matthew Short's 71 and 48 from Phil Salt. Manchester answered with 161 for 1 with 31 balls unused, Tim Seifert unbeaten on 62 and Buttler unbeaten on 51 from those 20 deliveries, a strike rate of 250. It ended a losing run for the Super Giants, though that was not what anyone left talking about.
What our own data says about how he does it
Our ball-by-ball database does not hold every T20 competition ever played, so the 14,833 figure above is his full career record and not ours. What we hold is 263 innings of his, across the internationals and leagues our data covers, and those innings are enough to show the method.
In them he has scored 8,700 runs from 5,784 balls, a strike rate of 150.4, with 849 fours and 390 sixes, a highest score of 131, and 58 fifties alongside nine hundreds. He has made nine T20 hundreds in his career, so every one of them sits inside our data.
The number that actually separates him
Across our whole database we hold 60,328 T20 innings. 9.4 per cent of them reach fifty. That is the reality of the format: roughly one innings in eleven becomes a substantial score, for everybody, including the great players.
Buttler passes fifty in 67 of his 263 innings in our data, which is 25.5 per cent. He does it 2.7 times as often as the field.
That is what a record like this is made of. Not one enormous night, but a quarter of every time he walks out turning into a score, sustained for a decade and a half.
And the shape of it
Two more figures from our data fill in the picture. 65.9 per cent of his runs came in fours and sixes, and he clears the rope once every 14.8 balls.
That second number is worth sitting with, because it is not an outlier. It is not Andre Russell's one every seven. Buttler is not the biggest hitter in the game and never has been. He is the most reliable converter of starts into scores that the format has produced, which is a different and rarer thing, and over 522 matches it has turned out to be worth more runs than anybody else has managed.
Coverage note
The career totals, match counts and the record itself are the published figures. Everything computed above, the 263 innings, the strike rate, the boundary share and the fifty rate, comes from our own ball-by-ball database, which covers international T20 cricket and the major leagues rather than every competition he has played in. Where the two differ, ours is deliberately the smaller number.