Bowl-out

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A bowl-out (sometimes termed a bowl-off) is used in various forms of limited overs cricket to decide a match that would otherwise end in a tie. The procedure is similar to a penalty shootout in association football. Five bowlers from each side deliver one ball each at an unguarded wicket. If each team has hit the same number of wickets after the first five balls per side, the bowling continues and is decided by sudden death.

In some forms of domestic one-day cricket competition, a bowl-out is used to decide the result when the match is tied or rained out: for example, the quarterfinal of the Minor Counties Cricket Association Knockout Trophy in 2004, when Northumberland beat Cambridgeshire 4-2.^[1]

In Twenty20 cricket, if the match ends with the scores level (either because both teams reach the same score after 20 overs, or the second team falls one run short of the target score under the Duckworth-Lewis method), the tie is broken with a bowl-out. A bowl-out was first used to decide a domestic Twenty20 match when Surrey beat Warwickshire in July 2005.^[2] The first international bowl-out in a Twenty20 match took place on 16 February 2006, when New Zealand beat West Indies 3-0 in Auckland.^[3][4] A bowl-out was also used on 14 September 2007 when India beat Pakistan 3-0 during the 2007 ICC World Twenty20 in Durban, South Africa.^[5]

The International Cricket Council (ICC) introduced the bowl-out should scores be tied in the semifinals and final of the 2006 ICC Champions Trophy or the 2007 Cricket World Cup, although it was not required to be used in either tournament.

At the ICC Annual Conference 2008 it was decided that the bowl-out should be replaced by a one-over eliminator (also called a "Super Over") in the 2008 ICC Champions Trophy (since postponed) and the 2009 ICC World Twenty20. In the eliminator over, the loss of two wickets by the batting side ends its innings. If the scores are equal then the team that has hit the most sixes combined from its two innings in the main match and the one-over eliminator is declared the winner. If the scores are still equal at that point then they will be separated by determining which of them scored the most boundaries — fours and sixes — in both innings.^[6] The first use of an eliminator over in international cricket was on Boxing Day 2008, when West Indies beat New Zealand 25–15 in a Twenty20 match (although this was an unofficial trial, and the match was officially declared a tie).^[7]

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