Ben Stokes has called for a change to the way over rates are assessed by the ICC, after England were docked two points in the World Championship for their slow play at Lord’s.
The England captain, who has confirmed he is continuing his one-man protest at the International Cricket Council by refusing to sign the post-match paperwork, accepts that spectators can be frustrated by how few overs are bowled and how rarely teams deliver the 90 that are scheduled for the day.
But Stokes feels there needs to be more common sense and argued there should be different criteria for matches in England – and Australia and New Zealand – compared to countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, where spinners can bowl the majority of overs and get through them far quicker.
“I’m not signing the form, no,” Stokes said. “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 round, getting told: ‘Oh, just quicken up, get through your overs.’”
Stokes argued the compressed nature of the fixture list for England’s series against India has made it harder for the fast bowlers, while the injury suffered by off-spinner Shoaib Bashir at Lord’s meant the seamers had to shoulder a bigger workload in the third Test.
“There’s a lot that actually goes on out on the field,” Stokes added. “You’ve got fast bowlers bending their back consistently. Throughout the course of a game, the [number] of overs is going to come down. You’ve just got tired bodies. We played for five days. That was our 15th day of cricket [in the series].
“We obviously had an injury to Bash, so we couldn’t turn to our spinner as much as we would’ve liked to on day five, so we had to throw 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 and just slow everything down, more tactically if anything, like that.
“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 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 bowled, because the spinner’s over takes less time than the seamer’s over. Common sense would think that you should look at changing how the over rates are timed in different continents.”
Stokes also feels the attacking style of batting that England have affects the over rate, with more time spent retrieving the ball after it has been hit for four or six.
“I wonder if scoring rates have got anything to do with that as well,” he added. “The ball’s getting hit to the boundary more often. It’s obviously 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.
“And there are times in games where there isn’t a game on the line, where you will just throw the ball to [the] spinner to get your overs round, but then that’s just... you’re playing in an international game, where you’re just trying to get your over rate back. I don’t think people want to come and watch that.”
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