On the eve of the potentially series-deciding fourth Test against India at Old Trafford, England skipper Ben Stokes has issued a strong warning to the visitors, making it clear that his team will not shy away from on-field confrontations.
“It’s a massive series and heat will be shown. Have England been nice? Potentially. We won’t purposely start anything, but we won’t take any backward step,” Stokes said at the pre-match press conference.
Stokes’ comments came after tempers flared between both sides in the Lord’s Test, including an animated flare-up between India skipper Shubman Gill and England openers towards the end of the third day of the Test that England eventually won by 22 runs to go 2-1 into the fourth match in Manchester.
The England skipper also touched upon the solitary change made in the playing eleven for the upcoming Test, and praised left-arm spinner Liam Dawson, who replaces the injured Shoaib Bashir.
“Dawson has been performing really well. He got recalled into the team, and I’m sure there will be nerves, but he’s experienced enough to handle it.”
Stokes didn’t shy away from addressing the controversy around slow over-rate penalties. England were docked two WTC points and fined 10 percent of their match fee following the Lord’s Test win, prompting Stokes to call for change.
“Over rate isn’t something that I worry about, but that’s not saying that I purposely slow things down. I do understand the frustration around it, but I honestly think there needs to be a real hard look at how it’s structured. You 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,” he explained.
“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.”
Stokes defended England’s over-rate in the Lord’s Test by pointing to off-spinner Bashir’s injury and the heavy workload on the fast bowlers.
“I 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. There’s a lot that actually goes on the field. You’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.”
“We 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,” he said.
After the fourth Test ends on July 27, both sides will face off for one final time in the series, with the fifth Test, starting July 31 at The Oval.