Cricket committee to propose new ODI rules

A radical set of rule-changes to revamp the one-day game will be considered by the International Cricket Council, which began a meeting in Melbourne yesterday. The ICC's Cricket Committee, which is headed by Sunil Gavaskar, recommended the rules to boost the flagging profile of one-day internationals, which many claim have become predictable in nature.

Gavaskar mentioned two of the proposed changes that would be suggested to the ICC: "We've looked at a double-play situation, where if a batsman has been given out lbw and the ball ricochets off to gully and the fielder picks it up and throws it at the non-striker's end, so you have two dismissals off one ball," he told the Melbourne newspaper The Age. "Same if the ball's gone up in the air."

He labelled one-dayers "predictable", and suggested that another way of making them more interesting was by splitting the 15-over fielding restriction into three blocks that the batting side could use when they wanted.

"The first idea was to leave it to the fielding side, but then we thought that you might have a situation where the fielding side is so good, they might dismiss the opposition in 35 overs and have no field restrictions at all," said Gavaskar. "What we have suggested is that the batting side will choose the 15 overs it wants. That makes it all the more challenging for the fielding side."

Asked about the possibility of Twenty20 cricket being a replacement for 50-over one-dayers, Gavaskar said that it would not be a regular part of the international calendar because only three countries had experimented with it so far.