England’s captain Ben Stokes addresses a press conference ahead of the fourth test cricket match between India and England, at the Old Trafford Cricket Ground, in Manchester, on July 22, 2025.
| Photo Credit: PTI
England captain Ben Stokes urged the International Cricket Council to change the over-rate rule after his team was docked two points in the World Test Championship for its slow play at Lord’s.
Stokes maintained that current over-rate regulations disproportionately penalise pace-heavy bowling attacks.
“You can’t have the same rules in Asia, where spin is bowling 70% of the overs, to have the same laws in New Zealand, Australia, England, where it’s going to be 70 or 80% of seam bowled, because spinners’ overs take less time than seamers’,” Stokes said on Tuesday (July 22, 2025).
“Common sense would think that you should look at changing how the over-rates are timed in different continents.”
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.
“You’ve got fast bowlers bending their backs consistently. Throughout 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 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,” Stokes added.
Published – July 22, 2025 10:44 pm IST
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