Pakistan and Sri Lanka drop Supersub for series

The Pakistan and Sri Lankan cricket boards have reached an agreement not to use the Supersub rule during their upcoming three-match one-day series from March 17. The bilateral decision has been made after a recommendation made by the International Cricket Council (ICC) chief executives last month in Dubai that the trial of the Supersub playing condition should be discontinued.

"Pakistan and Sri Lanka believe that as the Supersub experimental rule is going to be discontinued from later this month," said an official of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB). "There is no purpose using it in the coming series. Many other countries have also taken such bilateral decisions in their matches."

David Richardson, ICC's general manager, said that the Supersub rule had not achieved what it set out to deliver. "The intention of Sunil Gavaskar and the panel of former players on the ICC Cricket Committee, which recommended the trial of this playing condition, was to encourage teams to make greater use of allrounders in the ODI game," he said. "In practice, teams have elected to nominate a specialist player as the substitute and this is placing undue importance on winning the toss. There is no desire to create a situation where 12 players are used to do the job of 11 so we did not support the alternate view of allowing substitutes to be nominated after the toss. The proposal that the playing condition should be discontinued has been endorsed by the CEC and will now go to the Board for ratification."

If the board accepts this recommendation, the Supersub playing condition will no longer apply to series that start after 21 March 2006.