![\"Ben](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/122840088.jpg\" "\\"Ben")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
England captain Ben Stokes speaks to the media during a press conference at Old Trafford (Photo by Gareth Copley\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
England captain Ben Stokes<\/a> 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\u2019s 22-run win over India in the third Test at Lord\u2019s, 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\u2019t account for ground realities. \u201cOver rate isn’t something that I worry about, but that’s not saying that I purposely slow things down,\u201d Stokes said in a press conference ahead of the fourth Test at Old Trafford. \u201cI do understand the frustration around it, but I honestly think there needs to be a real hard look at how it’s structured. \u201cYou 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.\u201d Stokes also defended England\u2019s over-rate during the Lord\u2019s Test, citing fatigue and the demanding nature of a five-day match on the seamers. \u201cI 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,\u201d he said. \u201cYou’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. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Poll<\/p>\n Should ICC revise over-rate penalties based on playing conditions?<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"England captain Ben Stokes speaks to the media during a press conference at Old Trafford (Photo by Gareth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13923,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,2129,15411,15412,740,15415,15413,15416,2863,85,15417,15414],"class_list":{"0":"post-13922","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-ben-stokes","11":"tag-ben-stokes-england","12":"tag-ben-stokes-press-conference","13":"tag-cricket","14":"tag-england-over-rate","15":"tag-england-press-conference","16":"tag-icc-over-rate","17":"tag-ind-vs-eng","18":"tag-sports","19":"tag-stokes-icc","20":"tag-stokes-over-rate"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}