ENG vs IND fourth Test | Cannot have similar over-rate guidelines in Asia and different continents: England captain Stokes

England captain Ben Stokes urged the International Cricket Council to alter the over-rate rule after his staff was docked two factors within the World Test Championship for its sluggish play at Lord’s.

Stokes maintained that present over-rate laws disproportionately penalise pace-heavy bowling assaults.

“You can’t have the identical guidelines in Asia, the place spin is bowling 70% of the overs, to have the identical legal guidelines in New Zealand, Australia, England, the place it’s going to be 70 or 80% of seam bowled, as a result of spinners’ overs take much less time than seamers’,” Stokes stated on Tuesday (July 22, 2025).

“Common sense would assume that it’s best to take a look at altering how the over-rates are timed in several continents.”

In the earlier WTC cycle, over-rate points value England 22 factors. However, the captain remained unperturbed.

“Over-rate isn’t one thing that I fear about, however that’s not saying that I purposely sluggish issues down. I do perceive the frustration round it, however I truthfully assume there must be an actual laborious take a look at the way it’s structured,” he stated.

“You’ve acquired quick bowlers bending their backs constantly. Throughout a sport, the time of overs goes to come back down since you’ve simply acquired drained our bodies. We performed 5 days, that was our fifteenth day of cricket. We had an harm to Bash [Shoaib Bashir], a spinner, so we couldn’t flip to our spinner as a lot as we might have appreciated to on day 5.

“So, we needed to throw a seam at them for just about the entire day. That’s clearly going to sluggish issues down,” Stokes added.