England captain Ben Stokes feels the International Cricket Council (ICC) should change the over-rate rule which disproportionately penalises pace-heavy attack after his team was docked two points in the World Test Championship (WTC) for its slow play at Lord’s.
“You can’t have the same rules in Asia, where spin is bowling 70 per cent of the overs, to have the same laws in New Zealand, Australia, England, where it’s going to be 70 or 80 per cent of seam bowling, because the spinner’s over takes less time than a seamer’s over,” Stokes said on Tuesday.
“Common sense would think that you should look at changing how the over-rates are timed in different continents.”
After England was fined 10 per cent of the match fees and docked crucial points for maintaining a slow over-rate during the third Test, Stokes refused to sign the over-rate sheets presented by the match referee. “I’m not signing the form, no,” Stokes said.
This is not the first time he has refused to sign the form. He had done a similar thing during the 2023 Ashes in protest at the system. The ICC, however, did not pay any heed to it and rejected Stokes’ plea for reviews of over-rate penalties.
In the previous WTC cycle, over-rate issues cost England 22 points. However, the captain remained unperturbed. “Over-rate isn’t something that I worry about, but that’s not saying that I purposely slow things down. I do understand the frustration around it, but I honestly think there needs to be a real hard look at how it’s structured,” he said.
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The captain accepted that there’s a lot that actually goes out on the field. “You’ve got fast bowlers bending their backs consistently. Throughout the course of a game, the time of overs is going to come down because you’ve just got tired bodies.”
“We played five days, that was our 15th day of cricket. We obviously had an injury to Bash [Shoaib Bashir], a spinner, so we couldn’t turn to our spinner as much as we would have liked to on day five. So, we had to throw a seam at them for pretty much the whole day. That’s obviously going to slow things down.”
The skipper also reflected on the time it takes to retrieve the ball from the boundary. “I wonder if scoring rates have got anything to do with that as well. The ball’s getting hit to the boundary more often, so it’s going to take a lot longer. I think there’s just so much that influences how your over-rates can be affected, that it can’t just be as simple as, ‘this is the time, this is what you need to do’. Because you want to keep the quality of cricket as high as you possibly can,” said Stokes.