ICC Cricket Committee proposes radical innovations

The ICC's Cricket Committee has proposed a number of radical innovations to the game in the two-day meeting in Dubai. Among the changes suggested, all of which will first be trialed in domestic competitions, are:

allow the batting team to nominate the 15 overs in which fielding restrictions for one-day games would apply. The overs would not have to be bowled consecutively

have 12 players play each game, with only 11 batting and fielding

disallow overthrows resulting from the ball hitting the batsman, and only allowing overthrows when the ball hits the stumps

allow `double-play', where the ball remains live after the dismissal of a batsman, allowing the second batsman also to be dismissed during the same phase of play

The 12-players-a-side format has already being implemented in Australia in their domestic one-day competition - they switched back to 11 per team last season after experimenting with an extra member for a couple of years. Meanwhile, the idea of modifying the 15-over fielding restrictions in one-dayers has often been mooted by experts - most notably by Martin Crowe - to bring back some excitement into the middle overs of an ODI.

The Cricket Committee also recommended some changes to the current playing conditions:

the minimum number of overs required to constitute an ODI be reduced from 25 to 20

in case of playing time being lost due to any reason, the amount of time lost should be made up, not the number of overs. Currently, the playing conditions specify that the time lost should be converted into overs - with four minutes per over - which should then be made up over the subsequent days.

It was also suggested that in case of ODIs where no play is possible, the match would enter the record books if the toss had taken place. Also, in matches which had a reserve day, there would be no provision for a re-toss on that day if the toss had already taken place on the previous day.

The committee also studied, and proposed further trials, to the experiment of having tramlines drawn on the pitch and providing the umpires with earpieces attached to the stump microphones.