England head coach Chris Silverwood has on Wednesday (November 24) made it clear that he will not try the Ben Stokes-Jos Buttler IPL 2020 spot swap for the English set-up in the upcoming away white-ball series against South Africa starting on 27th of November in Newlands.
Recently, Rajasthan Royals had promoted Stokes as opener and even he also did the brilliantly for the franchise while Buttler batted in the middle-order in the recently-concluded IPL 2020 in the UAE.
However, Silverwood was happy to see the star all-rounder try his hand as an opener for RR in the IPL 13, but has ruled out any possibility of swapping his temporary job swap with Buttler in South Africa by saying he will not “muddy the waters” in the England camp.
With the tour begin with first T20I on Friday, England head coach has made it clear that Buttler will be his opening batsman while Stokes would continue to bat in the middle-order for England.
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In Monday’s intra-squad warm-up game, Buttler retained his place at the head of the innings, with Stokes came in at number three for Eoin Morgan’s XI.
Silverwood told the PA news agency on Wednesday, “It’s great that those two guys get experience of doing different things and I don’t think it ever hurts them as players to explore different options, but it doesn’t muddy the waters at all.”
The coach further explained, “We’re pretty certain about which way we want to go and we’ll do that. We are blessed with the batsmen we’ve got here, world-class players who are capable of doing a multitude of jobs in that order. I know Ben was keen to do it, he’s always keen to get up the order and give it a go. I wouldn’t say I was surprised, I’d say I was glad to see him do well.”
He signed off, “We've got a large group of players here but do have that squad that we'll initially pick from. If guys are here and doing well, you never know, but we picked that squad and we'll start there.”
