Suggestions to get more overs into Test cricket

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By Kersi Meher-Homji, 15 Dec 2009 Kersi Meher-Homji is a Roar Expert

Tagged:: Cricket, International Cricket, Test cricket

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$England\'s Stuart Broad, centre, celebrates with teammates the wicket of Australia\'s Brad Haddin. AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth$

England's Stuart Broad, centre, celebrates with teammates the wicket of Australia's Brad Haddin. AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth

These days captains find it difficult to squeeze in 90 overs a day in a Test match. In the days gone by, bowlers bowled 100 overs a day, no problems. That was with 8-ball overs, too, whenever Australia was involved before 1978.

Here are some suggestions:
* Replace the slim sight screen with a much wider one. So much time is wasted in moving the sight screen to the left and to the right whenever a right-hander and a left-hander are batting.

* Limit the distance allowed to a bowler for a run-up. I concede that Frank Tyson and Jeff Thomson in the past had huge run-ups, but we have no bowler of that speed now. And still they have unnecessarily long run-ups.

* One drinks-break per session is fine. But batsmen or fielders should not be allowed to ask for drinks in between the allotted breaks.

* A no-ball or a wide should count as two runs instead of one run. But no extra ball should be given. At times it becomes an 8 or 9-ball over. We can fit in a few extra overs if this rule change is brought in operation.

* If a batsman or a fielder is hurt badly and needs treatment, it should not be on the field. They should return to the pavilion to get treatment. In the case of a batsman, a new batsman should replace him and the latter can resume batting at the fall of a wicket. In other words, the game must go on.

* There should be some restriction on too much field-place changing. At times it is inevitable when a left-hander and a right-hander are batting. But no tedious conferences between captain, bowler, vice-captain, wicket-keeper and a former captain. “Hurry, chop chop” should be the motto.

* The referral system has as many supporters as antagonists. I was a supporter, but am not so sure now after the recent Australia – West Indies series. To me, it has created as many problems as it has solved. And it wastes time.

* For LBW decisions, the hardest part for an umpire is to make sure that the ball was not pitched outside the leg stump. On TV replays, we see the length from off-side at one end to the leg-side at the other end and from leg-side at one end to the off-side of the other shaded in grey. The umpire has not got this advantage the TV commentators and TV viewers have. If that zone is marked by two straight chalk lines across the area between the six stumps, the job of an umpire is made so much easier. Imagine the time saved by not referring to the TV umpire.

What do the Roarers think? Any other practical ideas?

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The Crowd Says (25) | Page 1 of Comments

Justin said | December 15th 2009 @ 7:23am | Report comment

Good to see some sensible thinking Kersi.

I really like the idea of marking out the stump width all the way down the pitch.

I do believe we should be getting decisions right as often as possible and if thats at the expense of 3 or 4 balls then so be it so I have no problem with the referral system. Its the captains that havent grasped how to use it properly in my view.

Most of your other suggestions sound like common sense. I HATE that bowlers over step the mark…AUS have a woeful recent record and it drives me insane, just move your bl00dy mark back 6-10 inches and hey presto!

I’d like to see the banning of “practice” bowls when a bowler starts a new spell. They will stand at mid off or mid on and bowl the ball a number of times to a team mate to loosen up. Tough luck, you have had an hour to warm up, we should not have to wait for you. If you bowl some slow or ordinary balls to the batsmen then tough.

The one big change I would invoke would be that each 30 over session must be completed before they can take the alloted break (ie lunch and tea). However they would commence play again at the alloted time. So if you are 3 overs behind you would lose 12 minutes of your lunch break and tea break. We would not then have troubles with bad light affecting the end of the days play as much either. I think after a little while you would see teams working harder to bowl their overs on time.

Also start suspending captains, I think this stick will have the biggest affect. They must have a no excuse policy also. So they must be harsh on it otherwise it will just become a joke deterrent.

Lets face it if history shows the game could manage 100 8 ball overs a day then there is no reason whatsoever that 90 6 ball overs can not be bowled.

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Jeff Dowsing said | December 15th 2009 @ 7:29am | Report comment

Agree with the thread of this one Kersi – it’s not the cricket that is killing the Test match form of the game, it’s the laborious time in between deliveries and overs. Much like baseball, it drags on and on – and I’m a fan of both sports. If the rusted on are thinking like this, then ICC, we have a problem.

Incentives, punishments, whatever it takes…here’s a chance for the ICC to show some leadership and make a positive difference for once.

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vinay verma said | December 15th 2009 @ 7:40am | Report comment

Kersi,Justin..many of the suggestions above would become unnecessary if there is a 10 run penalty for every over not bowled in a day. So if the fielding side is down 10 overs they get docked 100 runs before they start their innings. Maybe 10 runs an over is harsh and 5 will do. Conversely if a bowling team bowls more than the alloted overs they should be rewarded by having runs added to their score. This will also encourage more use of spinners.

I dont agree about marking lines down the wicket. It will look like the tramlines on a tennis court and next we will have a sensor to say it pitched outside and then a challenge..no this will lead to more delays. The simple solution is to take all referrals out of the hands of the player. The umpires are miked to the third umpire and it does not take long to convey if the ball pitched in line.Players should play and Umpires should umpire.

The widening of sightscreens is a must.
Bowlers get drinks on the boundary and this should be enough. Unless a batsman is sunstroked there is no need to hold up play. Running out gloves is a no no. Wait till the drinks break or bat without gloves.

Three of the four days in Adelaide, play did not start after lunch and tea till 3 minutes past the scheduled start. This is unacceptable.

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- Brett McKay said | December 15th 2009 @ 8:15am | Report comment
  
  Kersi, there’s some good thoughts here, but I’ve said the same thing as Vinay previously – start imposing run penalties, and the problem will disappear with the first tight Test match lost becuase of them. Imagine if an Ashes or Sunny/AB series was decided by over-rates?!?
  
  Widening the sightscreens is a throw-back (the Adelaide Oval sight screen used to stretch from cover to mid-wicket, or so it seemed – I would have been quite young when this was the case), and is a simple solution. Of course that will lead to less seats being available for sale, which will lead to higher ticket prices. Small price to pay, I’d reckon.
  
  However where I will disagree with Vinay and yourself is the stopping of unsecheduled drinks breaks, or changes of gloves etc. All these breaks can be controlled and hurried up by the umpires and fielding captain as it is, and there’s no real issue with a 12th man running drinks out at the fall of a wicket. Regarding the banning gloves changes Vinay, a batsman should be allowed to maintain a decent grip on his bat, in the same way a bowler is allowed to dry or even shine the ball. That’s just a simple matter of fairness..
  
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  - vinay verma said | December 15th 2009 @ 8:28am | Report comment
    
    Brett,where is your sense of humour,this was a tongue in cheek remark to get batsmen-centric cricketers like you to bite.
    
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  - Brett McKay said | December 15th 2009 @ 8:34am | Report comment
    
    Ha, reel me in then Vinay!! I’ve had my humour tested at work in the last 24 hours, so I’ve lost my ability to see tongue in cheek currently. Better go get a coffee!!
    
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Spiro Zavos said | December 15th 2009 @ 7:45am | Report comment

Phil Derriman, a very good sports writer for the SMH, told me about an experiment the cricket authorities once conducted to find out why in Don Bradman’s day and later they bowled up to 120 overs in a day. They studied all the old film clips but couldn’t find much difference in what the players do now and then. But in my view, the officials weren’t really looking.
1. Ban mid-wicket conferences between batsman. Up to the 1960s when I was playing batsmen did not have conferences after every over. You talked to the incoming batsman, and that was it.
2. The batsman has to be ready to face a ball whenever the bowler is. This is the rule/law now but should be enforced. In the past some bowlers were most effective in bustling in to bowl as soon as they go to their mark. Lance Cairns was the last of these bowlers.
3. Bowlers should go back to their bowling marks after the bowl is bowled, unless there is a possibility of a runout at their end.
4. A captain should have ca time limit on setting a field of, say, 40 seconds.
5. There should be a requirement of 30 over a sessions, and unless the requirement is fulfilled, the bowlers have to continue into their break until it is.
5. Everyone on the bowling side should be fined, significantly, if the over-rate each day is below the set minimum. There is nothing like the hip pocket nerve to inspire some action
6. I’m against restrictions on run-ups etc as artificial. But if the setting are tight enough, captains and bowlers will have to adjust to getting their overs through
7. I would actually increase the number of required overs an hour to 16, from 15.
8. In T20 cricket and one-day cricket they can get through their overs easily. Why not in the longer form of the game?

Finally, an historical note. I think the sloe over rate started in Test cricket with Len Hutton in 1956 (?) Ashes series in Australia when he had Frank Tyson coming into bowl from the sight screen. He slowed the game down with the slow over rate to allow Tyson time to recover between overs. Then other countries followed suit, especially the West Indies in the days when they had four fast bowlers as their attack.l

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Justin said | December 15th 2009 @ 7:55am | Report comment

Spiro – your last point is way off. Already in the IPL we are seeing games go 20-30 mins over time. ODIs have been going over time forever. Its a problem for cricket in all forms.

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- Brett McKay said | December 15th 2009 @ 8:23am | Report comment
  
  and in fact Justin, one of the origial T20 laws was that a 6 run penalty is invoked for every over over not bowled by the scheduled time for the start of the last over. Somehow, this didn’t make it into the domestic and international versions…
  
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Tony from Northbridge said | December 15th 2009 @ 8:12am | Report comment

Always love your work Kersi. A bit harsh on Thommo – Lillee &Thommo both shortened their run-ups later in their careers, but Dennis ran in much further than Jeffrey. Its the time taken between each and every over that is the biggest problem. In an average of 30 overs a session, that’s 29 changes of end. If they could save just 15 seconds for each of the 87 changes in the day, they would save nearly 22 minutes – and finish much nearer the scheduled close. What would Ponting have given for a few more overs at the last pair in the first Ashes test at Cardiff? Hit the fielding team where it hurts – in the hip pocket – not token amounts but some serious hurt money. Keep ratcheting up the amounts until we see a change.

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Joh4Canberra said | December 15th 2009 @ 8:22am | Report comment

If you took away extra balls to be bowled in lieu of wides and no-balls as you suggested then you get the perverse situation that it can actually encourage a team to *deliberately* bowl wides and certain kinds of no-balls in a case where conceding two runs is less costly than potentially having more than two runs per ball scored off the bat. If there is no requirement to bowl another lawful delivery in lieu of a wide or no-ball then the possibility arises of bowling sides deliberately bowling a wide or certain kind of no-ball and willingly conceding two runs in the process in order to deny the batsman an attempt at scoring more than two runs.

Just consider a tight finish to a match. Last ball of the match, batting team needs 6 runs to win. What do you do? You could potentially have a variation on the shameful underarm incident of 1981 where Trevor Chappell (under instructions by his brother Greg the captain) deliberately bowled a ball in such a way as to deny the batsman a legitimate chance of scoring the winning 6 runs. At the time it wasn’t illegal but now it would be considered a no-ball. Under your proposal there would still be an incentive to roll the ball along the ground, concede two runs for the no-ball and deny the batsman the chance of hitting a 6. Or if the batting side required 3 or more runs to win all the bowler would have to do is deliberately bowl a wide and concede two runs which is less than what the batting side require to win. You could even get the ridiculous situation where a bowler deliberately bowls an entire “over” of wides to deny the batting side the opportunity of scoring more than 12 runs from the over. If the batting team needs 14 to win from the last over, a bowler only has to deliberately bowl 6 wides to save the test match. That shouldn’t be.

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- vinay verma said | December 15th 2009 @ 8:34am | Report comment
  
  Joh4,all valid points and I agree that we should,as far as possible,not tamper with the laws as they stand. But the game must be speeded up. Captains have to take ownership of this and the run penalty will eliminate most of the time wasting.
  
  A simple solution to Brett’s “grip” on the game would be for the batsman to bring out an extra pair and keep it in the rabbit hole near squareleg.
  
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Tock said | December 15th 2009 @ 9:13am | Report comment

Great piece Kersi

Agree 100%. I would go 1 step further and impose a penalty on the bowling team off 10 runs for every over under 100 overs they fail to bowl in the days play, to be added to the batting teams total.

Since the 1970s, bowling captains have deliberately slowed the game down to break the concentration of the batsmen, slow the potential scoring in the days play and keep their bowlers fresh. It should have been jumped on 30 years ago. Dare I say it Mike Brearley made an art form of it and was soon followed by Clive Lloyd. Today all teams do it and even when the spinners are bowling the pace can be glacial.

I know a lot of people will disagree with the ten run per over penalty (some due to logistics and some due to general spirit of the game issues) but fines will not fix it. If you give them more time to bowl the overs they will dawdle at the same pace. The only way I can see that will force the bowling captain to pull his finger out, as it were, is to enforce a tactical disadvantage on them, one that may cost them the match. It would be similar in effect to a send off in the football codes.

Given that there is now a third umpire for test matches there is no reason why they cannot be the official time keeper and apply a simple formula for time lost such as injury, retrieving the ball from the crowd or a delay with a new batsman getting to the wicket.

I’m sure that there will be issues and situations that will occur that wont have been foreseen but I really think if they fix the over rate issue it will do a great deal to improve the overall appeal of test cricket.

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Tock said | December 15th 2009 @ 9:22am | Report comment

By the way the eight ball over was a far better arrangement. Those two extra balls allowed a bowler who was on top to work a batsmen over thoroughly and conversely if the batsmen were on top the bowler would be looking for somewhere to hide.

I know I’m dreaming but I still miss them.

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Kersi Meher-Homji said | December 15th 2009 @ 9:44am | Report comment

I agree with you, Joh4Canberra, regarding problems arising when extra balls are not given for no-balls and wides. I had not considered the possibilities you mention. Valid point.

Vinay, I like your idea about keeping extra pair of gloves in the “rabbit hole” near square leg. But I do not agree with you and Toc regarding penalty runs — unless you (Vinay) were joking and my sense of humour did not pick it up. Who to blame for time-wasting? Which team is responsible for it? Usually, the fielding side is blamed. But at times the batting side or both could be guilty. Who decides? Poor scorers and scoreboard operators will go insane! More time will be wasted than saved as players will point fingers saying, “Who umpire Sir, I Sir? No Sir, not I Sir. He, Sir!”

Spiro’s suggestion of finishing 30 per session at the cost of a shorter lunch or tea break is a good one. But if one deducts 15 minutes from a 20 minute tea break, the tea will have to be served cold!!

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- vinay verma said | December 15th 2009 @ 9:52am | Report comment
  
  Kersi,I believe the spectre of losing a Test match because of penalty runs is a far greater deterrent than fines. A captain could lose his job if he doesn’t ensure the overs are bowled. The Umpires are the sole arbiters and there is no grey area here.
  I remember Dickie Bird asking the batsmen and bowlers to hurry up. And so too Venkat. The Umpire is not there to be friends with the players. Courteos yes,but familiar,no. The penalty is only applied,if at all,at the end of the day’s play.
  
  And if the only price we pay is “cold” tea that is a small price to pay.
  
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