Jos Buttler Follows Adam Gilchrist's Example of Knowing When it's Time to go

Prior to making his Test debut against India last summer, Jos Buttler spoke of his ambition to emulate Adam Gilchrist in providing England with an attacking stroke-maker from the No7 position that could change the course of a match in a session. (Warner, Rogers stretch Aussie lead at Lord's)

We have now discovered his admiration for the great Australian wicketkeeper does not stop there as at 2.20pm on the Saturday of the second Test at Lord's, after feathering a catch behind off the spinner Nathan Lyon, he picked up his bat and walked off the field without waiting for the finger of the umpire Kumar Dharmasena to point the way. (Smith, Bradman in same club)

Gilchrist's name immediately springs to mind when a batsman surrenders his wicket in such a way, having been saddled with the tag of being a walker ever since he voluntarily departed during the 2003 World Cup semi-final. Stuart Broad's is another, following his dead-eyed refusal to budge at Trent Bridge two years ago.

The latter scenario, one of the most over-moralised in the history of the sport, saw Broad become public enemy No1 in Australia when the return series rolled around that winter, to the point where T-shirts were made up calling him "a shit bloke" and the Courier Mail newspaper in Brisbane decided their readers would prefer his name and image to be banned.

Should Buttler make the team for the 2017-18 Ashes tour - the next two times these sides meet in Test cricket - one would now expect him to be greeted by principled locals sporting slogans that extol the virtues of his character, with Queensland's best-read daily superimposing a halo around his head.

Technology was meant to make walkers of all batsmen, with those who gambled and lost when taking on the micro-processors of the host broadcaster's computers to be exposed as nefarious cheats. But, in the main, the willow-wielders have stuck to the principle of waiting for the officials to make the decision, a philosophy intertwined with the knowledge that the occasion will still arise when they are sawn off.

It is worth it, too. Even as the technology continues its march towards the almost certainly impossible ideal of 100% accuracy, they can still get away with the odd one. They are not always clear-cut.

The are times when the evidence must be strong enough to convince the official in the booth to overturn his colleague out in the middle; their integrity remains central to the game, hence we have "umpire's call" on deliveries that Hawkeye tells us would have sent leg-stump cartwheeling.

And there are of course occasions when technology actually blurs the decision, such as those low catches that could, at a molecular level, have touched the grass.

Buttler had survived the latter scenario just seven balls earlier when he edged Mitchell Johnson to Peter Nevill behind the stumps but remained, unconvinced his opposite number had truly pouched the ball.

The yellow-capped travelling Australian support in the upper Edrich Stand let their feeling be known with a chorus of boos when, after much deliberation, the third umpire, Chris Gaffney, concluded the turf may have indeed been involved.

In the case of Buttler's eventual demise, the conviction of the Australians in the field would, you fancy, have prompted a review and the evidence would have seen his innings end anyway.

HotSpot, the gizmo that has improved considerably since accusations of silicon tape being used on the edges of bats engulfed the 2013 Ashes series, showed a smudge of friction; Real-time snicko, introduced prior to the 2013-14 return leg in Australia, gave the lightest of tremors.

But Buttler did not wait for their implementation, instead simply turning away and beginning the long, slow trudge back to the pavilion as umpire Dharmasena's shake of the head neatly morphed into a nod of approval. Nice try, Kumar.

The Australian players, who gave double teapots for the earlier grassed catch, celebrated their breakthrough without an acknowledgement of Buttler's act and the television viewers were denied the dulcet tones of Gaffney, who has become something of a cult hero this series.

Would Buttler have disappeared so quickly had Australia already burned their reviews by this stage? Will he continue to follow this Gilchristian path throughout his international career?

Only he knows the answers to these at present and for now, whether he was prompted by the knowledge the technology would make a fool of him anyway, or simply the sense that fair play remains sacrosanct, we can only conclude that the England wicketkeeper is more Gilchrist than Broad.