Grinding to a halt: A history of over-rates in cricket

Day three of the World Test Championship final at The Oval has just begun, and India are 152-6 in their first innings against Australia, 316 behind. Later, the ICC will say that 123 million viewers watched the match in India alone, the largest audience recorded for any Test. And this is one of its most gripping passages. Ajinkya Rahane is batting with Shardul Thakur, while Scott Boland is on at one end, and Pat Cummins the other. Boland is tight and unforgiving, Cummins is hostile and malicious, making the ball jag and rear, hitting Thakur on the hand, arm and thigh. The Indian physio is in and out more often than a cuckoo in a clock, bringing the batsmen sprays, wrap and painkillers.

Bruised, and losing, Rahane and Thakur counter-attack, as if they can punch their way out of trouble. They hit fours through point, cover and square leg, a six over midwicket. Both are dropped, while three miscues fall just short of fielders. Australia call for a review, convinced they have an lbw, then another; Cummins almost traps Rahane, but it’s a no-ball. At lunch, with India 260-6, the crowd are happy and rapt. It has proved one of the more absorbing sessions of the summer – and one of the slowest. Cummins bowled seven overs, Boland five, Mitchell Starc and Cameron Green four each, Nathan Lyon two. That’s 22, in two hours’ play.

Long stretches of the game were played at a similar tempo: five overs lost on the first day, 13 on the second, 12 on the third. They evaporated like a puddle in the sun – a total of 30 across the first three days, or enough to fill an entire session. In the final reckoning, match referee Richie Richardson decided Australia were only four short, and India five. Each over cost a team 20 per cent of their match fee: India had to hand over everything they earned from playing the game, and Australia four-fifths.

It wasn’t always like this. In the 1940s, Test bowlers delivered more than 20 overs an hour. In the 1960s, it slipped to 17.72, in the 1980s to 14.36, in the 2000s to 14.09. In the current decade, to the end of 2023, it is 13.64. The rigmarole of referrals and reviews has slowed the game, as have concussion tests, hourly drinks breaks, and even more frequent incursions by the twelfth man. While everything else in modern life has been speeding up, cricket has been slowing down.

Almost everything, that is, because baseball is also worried its slow pace is putting off modern audiences, and so is golf. It’s all relative: the average Major League Baseball game is still completed in three hours and nine minutes. But all three sports depend on players being ready for each separate phase: golfers to complete their swing, and pitchers, or bowlers, to deliver the ball. And, in all three, the players’ decisions have been made even more complicated by the growth of statistical analysis. Cricket’s calculations have grown so convoluted it is not unusual to see players taking cheat sheets out of their pockets, reminding them which deliveries and fields are meant for which batters.

But the problem predates computers. It started after the Second World War. Previously, complaints about time-wasting had been aimed mainly at boring batsmen, not dawdling bowlers. In the 1950s, John Arlott argued it had become “inescapably prevalent ever since the post-war acceptance of the practice of the third-day declaration” in the County Championship, because teams had an incentive to slow down, and deny opponents a shot at victory. And it was exacerbated by a reduction in spin bowling, what Arlott called “the medium-pace monopoly”. The trend continued throughout the century: spinners sent down 43 per cent of overs in Test cricket in the 1950s, but 32 per cent in the 1990s.

Over-rates first became a problem at Test level during England’s 1954/55 Ashes tour, under the captaincy of Len Hutton. That was when “the rot really set in”, according to the old England and Yorkshire bowler Bill Bowes. “Hutton knew that Statham and Tyson were his main assets, so in that heat he told them to take their time and put everything into their bowling.” Hutton, who in 1980 would gripe that “the over-rate in my time was much quicker”, also admitted he “didn’t press the pace as quickly as I could have done. We already had two bowlers out of action and I didn’t want Tyson or Statham to crack up. Besides, the real technique against Neil Harvey was just to slow him down, ease up a bit and let him wait.”

England came to rely on these two fast bowlers, and Hutton made a point of walking 30 yards to confer with them between deliveries, allowing them to wait at the wicket to receive the ball from the fielders before heading back to the start of their run. In any case, he added, “the matches still got finished in time”. Whatever else has changed, then, the players’ rationale remains the same. So does the crowds’ view. England were heckled and slow hand-clapped. Australian papers reported that spectators left early. English spinner Johnny Wardle was apparently so bored that he made a point of entertaining them by sprinting between fielding positions.

It’s significant that Hutton was England’s first professional captain: like so much else in English cricket, slow over-rates became a class issue. You can hear it in the talk given to county administrators by MCC secretary Ronny Aird in 1959. MCC didn’t want to bring in regulations governing slow play, Aird explained, since it wasn’t – or ought not to be – necessary. He argued that “players and in particular their captains should not allow these situations to arise. If the self-discipline of the player fails him, the captain should be capable of dealing with the player concerned. If the responsibility of this is shifted from the captains to the umpires, we shall have no leaders left in a few years’ time.”

It didn’t help, either, that they felt compelled to sack one of English cricket’s few genuine leaders, Brian Close, because of time-wasting tactics in a match between Warwickshire and Yorkshire eight years later. There were exceptions, but an amateur captain was more likely to abide by the unwritten codes that suggested there was a duty to play the game at the right pace. Close, by contrast, had his own idea of a leader’s obligations, largely to do with giving his team the best chance of victory. If slow play served the cause, so be it.

“The game has in fact slowed down by four and a half overs an hour, a drop of almost 20 per cent, and it has virtually all happened in the past 15 years,” wrote EM Wellings in the 1968 Wisden. “A brisk over-rate is the essential core of a cricket match. Even when we expected 22 overs an hour in Test cricket – England at Lord’s in 1930 averaged 23 while Australia were scoring 729-6, of which Bradman made 254 – cricket was described as a slow game. Now we are lucky to get 18 an hour.”

The rates in Wellings’s time, when the one-day Gillette Cup was 65 overs a side, are inconceivable now. But if the captains weren’t going to force the pace, it wasn’t clear who would. In theory, it was now up to the umpires, but they have often seemed reluctant. In 1962, an experimental Law said bowlers could be cautioned if they were taking “an undue amount of time to get through their overs”. If they persisted, the umpire could direct the captain to remove them from the attack. It was a radical solution, which may be why no one really seems to have implemented it. But there were reports that umpire Syd Buller spent a lot of time conspicuously “scrutinising his watch” as England chased 399 to win the third Test against South Africa at The Oval in 1965. Buller made a point of meeting Peter Pollock a long way from the stumps to take his sweater, but according to The Guardian: “Pollock still followed slowly behind him to the stumps, before beginning his long heavy trudge back to the bowling mark.” It started raining, and England finished on 308 for four.

By the time Wellings sounded off in the Almanack, Aird’s idea that captains should be left to regulate the pace of play was as good as dead. And, after Somerset were robbed of two results by dawdling opposition in 1968, the fielding side were required to bowl a minimum number of overs in the last hour. In 1973, the old Test and County Cricket Board introduced fines for any team with a rate below 18½; the previous summer, only Hampshire and Leicestershire would have escaped penalty.

At Test level, almost every skipper was at it. West Indies seemed to have proved a correlation between fielding a battery of fast bowlers (and playing at a slow tempo to ensure they had a chance to rest) and success. During their 3-0 victory in England in 1976, they managed only 13.6 overs an hour. Some English players and journalists complained, but there were shrewder judges too. Scyld Berry pointed out: “The uncomfortable truth is that England began the tactic and want to call a halt now others are cashing in.” In the 1974/75 Ashes, Australian umpire Jack Collins had warned Peter Lever during a match between MCC and Victoria, when the tourists’ rate was 11 eight-ball overs an hour. “I’ve been on about this every bloody day for five years,” grumbled England’s chair of selectors, Alec Bedser, who sympathised with Collins. “But you can’t get hold of a bloke by the scruff of the neck and drag him back to his mark.”

However, you could, apparently, pelt him with oranges, as John Lever discovered in Karachi four years later while fielding on the boundary as England trudged along at 11 (eight-ball overs) an hour. Things reached a nadir on their tour of India in 1981/82, when the home side’s hourly rate dropped to nine (six-ball overs) as Sunil Gavaskar successfully defended a 1-0 lead.

By then, administrators were convinced of the need for more drastic measures. In the 1981 Ashes, both teams had agreed to a minimum of 100 overs a day, which, The Guardian noted, was “rather like the method prep-school teachers use to make kids eat their greens: you’re going to finish them and we’ll stay here to midnight if necessary”. Finally, in 1987, the ICC agreed to a minimum of 90. Only West Indies, convinced the ploy was a response to their success, voted against the new law. Another proposal, to cap the length of the bowlers’ run-ups, since – as Don Bradman said – “the long walk back is the greatest and least justified tedium in any sport”, was rejected.

It was too little, too late. The 90-over minimum ended up being treated as a 90-over maximum, and none of the efforts to enforce it since – fines, points penalties, suspensions – has had the desired effect. That was still the case when Australia played India at The Oval. Since it was the final, points penalties – which had cost Australia a place in the first final, two years earlier – were irrelevant. As Cummins said afterwards, “there aren’t many levers that can be pulled within the current rules that will entice anyone to bowl quickly” – a situation exacerbated by the fact that the match referee can take into account breaks for concussion checks and DRS reviews, making the 90-over minimum theoretical at best.

By the end of the summer, there were even fewer levers. After the ICC announced that both England and Australia would face fines and points deductions in the first three Ashes Tests, when an average of almost seven overs were lost each day, Australian opener Usman Khawaja revealed that he and other players had been lobbying ICC general manager Wasim Khan to revise the system. At their next AGM, the ICC decided fines would be lowered to 5 per cent of the match fee for every missing over, capped at a total of 50 per cent, but wouldn’t apply if a side were bowled out inside 80 overs. (This suited Australia better than England: Ben Stokes’s Bazballers scored so quickly that they lasted 80 overs in only three innings of nine, and two of those didn’t go beyond the 82nd.) “It is really frustrating as a player,” said Khawaja. “You are giving it your all out there, providing entertainment, then you are getting stung for it.” Sometimes.

England, for example, decide on a case-by-case basis whether players pay the fines. In mitigating circumstances, the board stump up. But even reduced fines didn’t satisfy the players, and when, at the end of the Ashes, England were docked 19 points, Stuart Broad complained it was diminishing the credibility of the World Test Championship. Since the deductions meant England retained only nine of the 28 points they earned by winning two Tests and drawing a third, he might have been on to something. Geoff Allardice, the ICC chief executive, conceded they had not got it right.

All summer, and every way you turned, you felt the tug of opinion. The players argued the quality of the cricket was what mattered, not the pace: they just will not be rushed when the game is on the line, unless it improves their chances of winning. The spectators, many of whom – though not all – felt short-changed, argued quantity counted too.

Occasionally, a conscience is piqued. After the third day of the Edgbaston Test against Pakistan in 2016, when 81 overs were bowled, England’s Alex Hales ended up paying out a partial refund after a fan complained on Twitter: “I want 10 per cent of my money back. Wouldn’t go to football and find it ended after 80 minutes.” Hales sent him £4.10.

Ultimately, fines and points deductions don’t work very well because the pace of a game is invariably dictated by the competing needs of the teams. The only effective deterrent is an in-game penalty, such as the ones now used in white-ball matches, where a fielder is brought inside the 30-yard ring for every over unbowled after the scheduled finish.

The Caribbean Premier League went further in August, when Sunil Narine of Trinbago Knight Riders was nominated by his captain, Kieron Pollard, to be sent from the field for slow play: their team had been shown a red card by the umpire because they were behind the required rate at the start of the last over. It cost 18 and, though Trinbago still won, Pollard described the new rule as “absolutely ridiculous”. And in December, the ICC began trialling a stop clock in white-ball games, with teams obliged to begin an over within 60 seconds of completing the previous one; a third transgression in an innings would invoke a five-run penalty.

How long, you wonder, before Test cricket follows suit?

Andy Bull is senior sportswriter for The Guardian.

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