Published: Jul 23, 2025, 01:44 PM (IST)
Edited: Jul 23, 2025, 01:44 PM (IST)
Ben Stokes addressed the controversy surrounding slow over-rate penalties ahead of the fourth Test of the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy series against India.
After a win at Lord’s, England were lost two WTC points and fined 10% of their match fee, prompting Ben Stokes to call for a change in the rules.
“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 70-80 per cent seam bowling,” Ben Stokes pointed out the slow over rate issue on Tuesday.
“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,” he added.
Stokes attributed England’s slow over-rate at Lord’s to Shoaib Bashir’s injury and the added workload on the fast bowlers.
“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. There’s a lot that actually goes on the field. 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,” Stokes said.
“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,” he added.
The ongoing debate around over-rate penalties illustrates Stokes’ desire for rule changes that reflect the realities of modern Test cricket.
