Over-rate debate: Stokes wants different rules for different conditions

Manchester: A burning issue this Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy has been the slow over-rates. England were docked two World Test Championship points following their hard-fought 22-run win over India in the third Test at Lord’s that saw them drop from second to third in the standings in the new 2025-27 cycle.

Slow over-rates have been an issue that’s been plaguing England for a while now. In the previous 2023-25 cycle, they were docked 22 points and England skipper Ben Stokes felt it’s hard to get the overs in time in seam-friendly countries, especially when games are on the line.

“Look, I can understand it from an external point of view around the overs. I really do. But it's a very tough thing to do when I feel there's more to it than just getting rounds,” Stokes said at the pre-match press conference ahead of the fourth game.

“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. There are periods in the game where you do try to slow everything down, more tactically if anything like that.”

Stokes suggested there should be some leniency to the rule to games played in countries where pacers bowl a majority of the overs. “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. You can't have the same rules in Asia, where a spinner is bowling 70% of the overs, to have the same laws in New Zealand, Australia, England, where it's going to be 70-80% seam.

“Because the spinner's over takes less time than the seamer's over. So common sense would think that you should look at maybe changing how the over rates are timed in different continents. I think as well, the over rates have obviously gone down over the course of quite a few years now. I wonder if scoring rates have got anything to do with that as well. The balls getting hit to the boundary more often, so it's going to take a lot longer.”