On an Ashes tour where Usman Khawaja has saved his team the blushes on a few occasions with bat in hand, the veteran opener might also have saved his teammates a significant amount of money and some valuable World Test Championship (WTC) points. It’s likely that Khawaja could have saved close to AUD 25,000 and 14 WTC points overall for Australia after he revealed to have played a key role in the ICC’s latest amendments for sanctions on slow over rates in Test cricket. At the recently held annual conference of the ICC in Durban, the governing body of the game approved changes to over-rate sanctions in Test cricket to balance the need for over-rates to be maintained and ensure players are appropriately remunerated. “As such players will be fined 5% of their match fee for each over short up to a maximum of 50%. If a team is bowled out before the new ball is due at 80 overs, there will be no over-rate penalty applied even if there is a slow over rate. This replaces the current 60 over threshold,” the ICC said. Khawaja revealed how he had approached Wasim Khan, the ICC’s general manager, to raise concerns about the existing rule in play which saw players lose 20% of their match-fee for each over short of the deemed target. Australia’s players were fined 80% of their match fee (India were fined 100%) at the World Test Championship final last month and subsequently lost another 40% of the fee after the Ashes-opening Edgbaston Test. “I was pretty frustrated with what was happening,” Khawaja said in the build up to the Manchester Test. “I just thought someone has to find a way to speak to the ICC about it. We had played three games and they’d been three really good games with results, [providing] entertainment and we were getting fined 80% of our match fee. It’s a lot of money. We’ve been behind the over-rates a bit, ICC have been stinging us a bit. Thankfully they have come around and changed some of those fines, which was killing me. While the ICC has yet to confirm what the fines and points deductions for the early Ashes Tests would be, Australia could benefit from the new regulations as they bowled out England within 80 overs in their second innings at Edgbaston.
