ICC Pulls Off Epic April Fool’s Day Prank With New Test Rules

The International Cricket Council (ICC) on April 1 announced a set of new rules for test cricket, coinciding with the April Fool’s Day.

The rules appeared outrageous from the word go, but ICC made a ‘well-built’ presentation through a series of tweets, getting the better of cricketing buffs, even if April fool pranks kept playing in their minds.

The Tweets carried the hashtag CricketNotAsYouKnowIt, declaring that twitter polls would replace coin toss and that players would wear shorts if the temperature reaches 35 degree celsius.

If still some believed in them and engaged in serious conversation, including former England cricketer Michael Vaughana, they were in for a disappointment.

The following day, ICC once again took to its Twitter handle and cleared all confusions saying “Did we fool you yesterday with #CricketNotAsYouKnowIt?”

“Get a round up of yesterday’s #AprilFools and reaction to last week’s Mankad incident and more…”

ICC also attached a report with the Tweet, saying how it led the way in making fun of the day.

“We introduced everything from Instagram handles on the back of shirts, Twitter polls in place of the traditional toss of the coin, and, in special circumstances, shorts in Test cricket”, it said, alluding to the efforts put up to celebrate the day the cricketing way.

The April fool tweets followed a rather unusual incident on the field two weeks back when Rajasthan Royals’ Jos Buttler was fooled by Kings XI Punjab bowler R Ashwin through an unconventional run out in an IPL match in Jaipur, better known as the ‘mankad’.

Was it then the mankad moment that inspired ICC to test the cricketing lovers sense of humour?