It has been another quietly revolutionary week for English cricket’s relationship with that oddly insistent entity; the outside world. The selection of a World Twenty20 squad for next month’s tournament in India has again focused the mind on the fraught, quietly shifting connection between new and old worlds.

The legacy of non-engagement with the global T20 world is still here. England’s 15-man squad contains nine players with no experience of the major franchise leagues, a senior batsman in Joe Root who has only ever batted 35 times in T20 matches anywhere, and just two players with experience of the Indian Premier League.

On the plus side it also contains Jos Buttler and Sam Billings, in their own way frontiersmen in a tentative thawing in the tense, often destructive interaction with the BCCI’s powerhouse league. For the first time two current England players have been not just allowed but encouraged to play the full Indian Premier League season in April and May, thereby ruling themselves out of seven County Championship matches and pretty much an entire home Test series.

The decision to allow Buttler in particular to play a full IPL season represents a profound change of policy for the England and Wales Cricket Board, and further evidence the unshakeable primacy of Test cricket is perhaps a thing of the past. Buttler may no longer be in the Test team but he remains an England poster boy, an A-list draw alongside Ben Stokes and Joe Root. To offer such a prime asset a seven-week IPL break is a genuine breath of perestroika.

Intriguingly, even a little oddly, it emerged this week Buttler himself appears to have been told a lack of first-class matches will be no obstacle to an instant Test recall. “Trevor [Bayliss] has said there’s no reason why you can’t play in the IPL, come back and play in a Test match a week later,” Buttler said shortly before he was bought by Mumbai Indians for £385,000 as “back-up overseas batsman” to Corey Anderson and Lendl Simmons, both of whom can expect to be pushed hard by English cricket’s most exhilarating hammer of the white ball.

What to make of this drastic shift in policy? Certainly there is a lot to be said for pragmatism and flexibility, special cases being made. Andrew Strauss deserves credit for sticking to his brief of embracing the white-ball world, including relaxation of the key Andy Flower rule that at least one first-class match is required before a player can be considered for selection for Tests, a rule that limited English players to three weeks at the IPL.

As England captain, Strauss was involved in a famous spat with Chris Gayle on exactly this issue “There’s a line and certainly we wouldn’t want our players to arrive two days before a Test,” Strauss said after Gayle had rocked up straight from the IPL to play a Test at Lord’s in 2009. And yet, six years on, what’s good for Gayle is now good for Strauss too.

At first glance, at least. It is also worth remembering Strauss spoke more sternly in November of players becoming white- and red-ball specialists, of being told eventually they must choose between the two. With a nod to the law of unintended consequences it is possible this might just be what ends up happening with Buttler now.

In theory there is now nothing to prevent him getting back from the IPL on 22 May then playing a Test match for England against Sri Lanka five days later: no stigma, no need to join the queue, respect the longer form, recalibrate your game in four-day purgatory. And yet it is still hard to see how, logically or fairly, Buttler can be picked to play Tests under this arrangement. White-ball commitments will rule him out of all but three Championship matches for Lancashire this season, his only scheduled red-ball games in a 20-month period running from last October to June 2017.

Just imagine the peculiar signals it would send to every other player in contention for the same spot if Buttler was allowed to waltz back into the Test team on a hunch or in the hope the passing of time (“some nugget I’ve picked up in the IPL”, in his words) will have fixed a batting technique that has looked ill-suited to extended periods of defence on pitches where the ball moves.

Sam Billings, Jos Buttler, Moeen Ali and Jason Roy of England during a nets session at Zayed stadium in Abu Dhabi. Photograph: Gareth Copley/Getty

More simply, it is hard to see how Buttler is supposed to improve sufficiently to justify a recall. He was dropped from the Test team for a reason. He may have the hands of a cricketing demigod – whippy, low-slung, beautifully destructive – but the long game is bound up with footwork and Buttler tailed off in Tests because his feet seem to exist in a slightly separate sporting universe to those glorious hands.

This isn’t a glitch or run of poor form. He has two first-class hundreds in five years. This is a thrilling, but also very specific kind of talent.

At which point you wonder if it may be best just to go with the natural consequences of all this, to offer Buttler the choice, without blame or recrimination, simply to exist within the white-ball world. He is a brilliantly pure, distinctive cricketer, with a cold-eyed televisual charisma. If he plays as he can over seven weeks in India he could find himself at another level altogether; English cricket’s first post-KP global Twenty20 star.

There are both enormous financial rewards here and also a kind of ambassadorial gravitas. English relations with the IPL have been traumatic on all sides, not least for the players who have tried to combine IPL and England cricket, with a relentless grinding of gears over availability, payments, player priorities. Kevin Pietersen’s desire to play a full IPL was a spark for the toxic cluster-bomb that was the end of his England career.

Eoin Morgan has found a balance after the associated traumas of his IPL stints in 2009 and 2010. Luke Wright played 46 ODIs before his six-game spell in the IPL in 2013, and just four since. Ravi Bopara tried to combine an IPL spring with an Ashes summer six years ago and never really recovered with England.

This year’s auction was a curious thing all round, with the franchises less star-struck and more intent on balancing squads. At the top end Shane Watson was bought for a sensational $1.98m, in return for which he might actually have to bowl a bit. Further down Carlos Brathwaite fetched more than Pietersen, the big cheese of the Big Bash.

Next year will be a full auction, with a much wider roster of players up for grabs. It seems likely the ECB’s new engagement policy, or alternatively its intervening muddle, will be properly tested then, with Ben Stokes, Root and others sure to be drawn to the light. For now, Buttler enters a year of format shemozzle and untested ground, a kind of laboratory test case in the ongoing process of engagement.

There will be friction and awkward choices. Not to mention a danger of trying to wring too much out of a player who may or may not end up having a Test career from here, but who should simply be allowed to breathe in the air that suits him best.