Radical innovations on the cards

The ICC's cricket committee has proposed a number of radical innovations to the game at its two-day meeting in Dubai. Among the changes suggested, all of which will first be trialled 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

Select 12 players for 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 a baseball-style "double play", in which the ball remains live after the dismissal of a batsman, allowing the other batsman also to be dismissed during the same phase of play

The 12-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 player 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 a one-day international.

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

If playing time is lost due to any reason, the amount of time lost should be made up, rather than the number of overs. Currently, the playing conditions specify that the time lost should be converted into overs - at 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 one.

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.