England captain Ben Stokes has urged the International Cricket Council (ICC) to revisit how over-rates are monitored and penalised, especially across different playing conditions and continents. Following England’s 22-run win over India in the third Test at Lord’s, the hosts were docked two World Test Championship (WTC) points and fined 10% of their match fee for maintaining a slow over-rate. Stokes, however, believes the current rules don’t account for ground realities. “Over rate isn’t something that I worry about, but that’s not saying that I purposely slow things down,” Stokes said in a press conference ahead of the fourth Test at Old Trafford. “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 70-80 per cent seam bowling. Because a spinner’s over takes less time than a seamer’s over. So common sense would think that you should look at maybe changing how the over rates are timed in different continents.”
Stokes also defended England’s over-rate during the Lord’s Test, citing fatigue and the demanding nature of a five-day match on the seamers. “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, getting told I’ll just quicken up, get three overs,” he said. “You’ve got fast bowlers bending their backs consistently. So throughout the course of a game, the time of overs is going to come down because you’ve just got tired bodies. “We played for five days, that was our 15th day of cricket. We obviously had an injury to 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. So that’s obviously going to slow things down. And there are periods in the game where you do try and just slow everything down, more tactically if anything like that.”
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Moreover, following the hosts being handed the penalty, England legend and former captain Michael Vaughan not only questioned ICC, but also asked why only one team faced the consequences.“Let’s be honest both teams over rates at Lords were very very poor .. How only 1 team has been reprimanded is beyond me,” Vaughan wrote on X after England were deducted points.
