Earmarking players for particular formats makes life easier for selectors. It reduces the need to carefully manage workloads and also means that you neatly sidestep awkward questions when a Test player has barely played any first-class cricket because he’s been busy with the international white-ball teams.

These factors feed into one another and together explain why England’s red and white-ball squads have increasingly diverged in recent years. The situation means that whatever their broader ambitions, many players have found themselves shepherded towards just one format.

Jos Buttler’s return to the Test team therefore marks a very definite change in policy. It seems that the new national selector, Ed Smith, harbours some crazy notion that all three formats are aspects of the same sport.

While the ploy was only moderately successful, ‘moderately successful’ is a legitimate and appropriate ambition for England’s Test batting line-up right now. More significantly, the thinking behind the change is to be applauded.

Having folded like junk mail in the first Test, here was a tactic to combat a very specific threat. It made sense and it seems like it was Buttler’s idea.

Buttler is a very obvious innovator and you wonder at the extent to which he brings lateral thinking and a willingness to experiment to a Test team that, if picked solely on County Championship returns, would be at risk of becoming a little homogenous in its thinking.

If Jos Buttler brings good ideas from T20 leagues, that is not to say that the thinking there is superior to that in the English domestic game – it is just to say that it is different, and that difference means a greater breadth of ideas within the team.

Perhaps broadening the thinking within the Test team is another point to be made in the case against allowing England’s red and white-ball teams to diverge too far from one another.