Jos Buttler, with his beautiful violence, should be a free-to-air star

The big news this week in English cricket, away from the strangely fraught, distant damp‑looking stuff taking place in Sri Lanka, is that according to Surrey’s chief executive, Richard Gould, a rump of first-class counties have decided, a decade into willed obscurity, that they do actually want to be on television after all. Or at least, on the kind of television someone other than the pre-converted might watch.

The only really surprising thing here is that it’s taken so long to realise this may be a good idea. Indeed, 10 years down the line it seems pretty clear the greatest trick the England and Wales Cricket Board ever pulled was convincing the counties that allowing the England team to be hived off – to cavort profitably behind the tinted windows of its members-only private club – would also secure the future of those who only supply the fittings and the staff, the legwork, the nibbles; and who rely for their long-term good health on visibility, passing trade and something more than being left to haunt the cobwebbed gamekeeper’s cottage at the edge of the estate while the upstart in-laws enjoy the whirl of the summer season.

It seems fairly obvious there is a great deal to be clawed back from ensuring cricket becomes visible again to those who are currently beyond its reach. For a start there are plenty of kids out there playing at junior levels who could go either way, who may get the bug or may not, but who also don’t really know what Gary Ballance looks like, or what Sam Robson does – but who do know about Virat Kohli and Chris Gayle from stumbling across the IPL when it was on ITV4. It is clear enough. If you build it, and show it just after teatime with Mark Butcher and Dominic Cork on a beige velour sofa, they will come.

More than this, cricket needs stars. Proper, broad-brush, crossover stars who can pollinate the sport beyond its borders. Which brings us back to Sri Lanka and – with all necessary apologies – to Jos Buttler, who on Wednesday in Hambantota played an innings of 55 from 37 balls that is by some distance the most exhilarating, skilful, thoroughly engrossing performance any English sports person will produce this week. But who remains for now that rarest of things, a slightly undersold talent, a semi-visible hotshot, the most charismatically gifted not‑yet‑somebody in English sport.

Judged against comparable levels of hyperbole elsewhere – and with youth, talent and an imminent World Cup thrown in – there really should be something stirring out there by now, a hint of Buttlermania, a mild but necessary celebrification of England’s most magnetic 50-over player. There is of course a code of weary omertà among many English cricket fans when it comes to young talent. Don’t build them up. Don’t scatter that ruinous stardust. The first rule of Jos Buttler club is: don’t talk about Jos Buttler club. But it’s OK. We can do this now. Buttler is 24 years old. He’s not going to scuttle away and hide behind the skirting board if we turn the lights on.

Indeed one of the benefits of the white noise from the Kevin Pietersen affair has been the relative pocket of calm in which Buttler has been allowed to bloom, consolidating in the past year a promising run of match-turning performances into an excellent set of 50-over stats. These are of course still early days. But right now Buttler is all set to become the only player in ODIs, retired or currently playing, with more than 1,000 runs at an average above 30 and a strike rate of more than 100. If this sounds torturously specific, it is in fact a very eloquent expression of basic Buttler power, the stippled outline of a high-class match-winning No7 batsman distilled through the eternally confusing matrix of ODI batting statistics.

Here is player for whom every innings is a pointed threat. There is no such thing as a meaningless Jos Buttler fifty, a gratuitous 40, a meandering 30. Whatever his final run total his batting always seems, somehow, to be heading towards exactly the right place on the map. And, like Alex Ferguson-era Manchester United, Buttler doesn’t ever really lose a match – he just runs out of the time needed to win it.

Plus he is simply a captivating spectacle in full flight. Oh, the beautiful violence in those hands, the severity of those fast-twitch cuffs and swats and bunts. Here is a batsman whose brain seems to whirr constantly. Buttler hits the ball with such easy violence he doesn’t need to beat the field, simply to miss it by inches, a quality that puts him a step ahead before the ball is even bowled. The hands take care of themselves, leaving space to breathe, to plan, to calibrate. He is, at the crease, the most fascinatingly still, unhurried man in a brutal tearing rush you’re ever likely to see.

But enough drooling. You get the idea. Buttler isn’t a one-shot answer to decades of underachievement but he’s what we’ve got now, the kind of cricketer who might have been perfectly placed to take the sport to the unconverted in more visible times.

It is clear what needs to happen here. There is a need to re-engage, and not just with the altered gravity of the global Twenty20 leagues, where Buttler and others should certainly be encouraged to play. County games on free-to-air TV is a good start but some short-form international matches would be even better. Above all, it is simply time English cricket’s semi-visible stars stepped out from behind the velvet rope, time to captivate and engage, to reach out once again beyond those profitably receding boundaries.