Visiting team should be able to choose whether to bat or bowl, opines Lehmann
Australian head coach, Darren Lehmann voiced his support for the scrapping of the coin toss after the English county decided to do away with the 272-year tradition. Under the new rules, the visiting team will be given the choice to bowl first, and only if they choose not to do so will there be a toss.
Lehmann also expressed his opinions on four-day Test cricket, which is being proposed to be introduced. The Australian coach was open to the idea of shortened version of the longest format of the game.
“That is one that should definitely come into cricket, where the opposition gets the right to choose what they want to do. I reckon it will stop all the wickets suiting the home team,” Lehmann said.
“As you saw in Perth, the wickets don't suit how we want to play sometimes and in Australia, in general, the wickets have been fantastic for years, it doesn't really matter on the toss, who wins or not. But in some other places it certainly has a big bearing on the game,” he continued.
Home teams have recently taken advantage of playing on known conditions to put the visiting team under serious pressure. Most recently, many former cricketers and present cricketers had lashed out against the state of the Nagpur pitch as South Africa struggled to handle the Indian spinners.
The MCC World Cricket Committee had voiced concerns regarding teams that prepared pitches that were too advantageous to the home teams. The committee felt that the new toss rule would help in curbing the aforementioned “problem”.
After the recently concluded day-night Test between Australia and New Zealand, Lehmann expressed his delight with the pink-ball Test. However, he felt that there was room for improvement to make pink-ball Test matches more competitive and popular.
“It was probably over a little bit quick for my liking in terms of the game but it was exciting for three days and it could have gone either way. Maybe a little less grass [on the pitch] and maybe get the ball a little bit darker in the seam, but it's only a little bit of tweaking. I was quite impressed by it. I know the fans loved it ... we have just got to make it better,” Lehmann suggested.
The cricket fraternity has been bringing up ideas to make Test cricket more attractive to fans, who have been gradually attending fewer Test matches with the rise of T20 cricket.
In this regard, four-day Test cricket is an idea that has been recommended to make fans come to the stadium. Lehmann stated his support for anything that would help the game of cricket become popular.
“We don't bowl our 90 overs in a day as it is, so that is probably the only thing," he said. "But I'm open to all those sorts of things. Whatever makes the game better for the fans is pretty important,” he said.