Markram flies home from the Hundred, and Buttler leads a side for the first time in 17 months
Manchester Super Giants lost their captain to a personal-reasons departure on Wednesday and won by nine wickets hours later, with Jos Buttler back in charge of a team for the first time since the Champions Trophy.
Aug 6, 2026
Manchester Super Giants lost their captain on Wednesday and won their next game by nine wickets, which is not the sequence anyone plans for. Aiden Markram has gone home to South Africa for personal reasons and will play no further part in the Hundred. Jos Buttler took the armband for the trip to Emirates Old Trafford a few hours later.
The franchise kept the statement short, confirming only that Markram had returned to South Africa for personal reasons. There is no indication he will be back before the tournament ends.
What Markram leaves behind
Five matches, 117 runs, and a half-century against MI London at the Oval in what turned out to be his last innings of the competition. That game was also the third of three straight defeats, a run that had dropped a side who started well into the middle of the table with the group stage running out.
Losing a captain mid-tournament is usually a problem. Manchester had the unusual luxury of a replacement already in the dressing room who has captained an international side at a World Cup.
Buttler leads a team for the first time in 17 months
Buttler announced he was standing down as England’s white-ball captain on 28 February 2025, after a group-stage exit at the Champions Trophy completed a run of three failed ICC campaigns. He led the side once more, against South Africa in Karachi, and that was the last time he captained anybody. By then he had been England captain 95 times across ODIs and T20Is, and had won the T20 World Cup in 2022.
His first game back in charge went about as well as it could. Welsh Fire made 155 for 4. Manchester knocked it off for the loss of one wicket with 31 balls to spare, Tim Seifert finishing unbeaten on 62 and Buttler on 51 from 20 deliveries with six sixes in it. Somewhere in that innings he moved past Kieron Pollard to become the leading run-scorer in the history of T20 cricket.
He had already scored 226 runs at an average of 112 before he was handed the job, so the captaincy has not slowed him down. Whether it stays that way over three more weeks is a different question, and one Manchester will find out at the same time as everyone else.
Bracewell arrives, but not immediately
Michael Bracewell has been signed to fill the overseas slot. The 35-year-old New Zealand allrounder captained Lahore Qalandars at the Global Super League last month and played for Southern Brave in last year’s Hundred, so the competition is familiar. He could not get to Manchester in time for the Welsh Fire game and is expected to be available for the last two group fixtures.
That is the sensible way round. Bracewell arrives for the matches that decide whether Manchester play knockout cricket, rather than for the one where his new team-mates were still working out who bats where.
The run-in
Wednesday’s win lifted Manchester to third, with three wins and three defeats from six. Trent Rockets sit clear at the top on five wins from six and look the most settled side in the competition. The gap between third and sixth is small enough that a bad week undoes a good month, which is the Hundred working as designed.
So Buttler has inherited a team that is well placed rather than safe, and he has to settle a new overseas signing into it while the group stage is still being decided. One nine-wicket win does not answer much. It was a good way to start.