Ben Stokes 'asked umpires not to award four overthrows which helped England to World Cup final glory'

The hosts went on to beat New Zealand at Lord's on Sunday after ties in both the game itself and the super over, but were given four runs when the ball hit the Durham allrounder's bat in the final over of regulation play

Ben Stokes asked the umpires not to award the four overthrows that swung the game back in England's favour in their eventual victory over New Zealand in the World Cup final on Sunday, James Anderson has revealed.

Eoin Morgan's side needed nine runs to win from the final three deliveries of their allotted 50 overs when Martin Guptill's throw ricocheted off the bat of Stokes, who was trying to complete a second run, for four runs.

The additional runs swung the chase back in England's favour but Anderson, speaking on the BBC's Tailenders podcast, suggested that the Durham allrounder asked the umpires to overturn their decision.

"The etiquette in cricket is if the ball is thrown at the stumps and it hits you and goes into a gap in the field you don’t run," Anderson said.

^{Mark Wood was run out off the final ball}

"But if it goes to the boundary, in the rules it's four and you can't do anything about it. 

"I think, talking to Michael Vaughan who saw him after the game, Ben Stokes actually went to the umpires and said, 'Can you take that four runs off. We don't want it'. But it's in the rules and that's the way it is. 

"It's been talked about for a while among the players, potentially that being a dead ball if it does hit the batsman and veer off somewhere."

However, the drama of the day didn't end there and with two needed off the final ball, Mark Wood was run out in trying to complete a second run in an incident which Stokes believed at the time had cost England their chance at World Cup glory before the team's heroics during the super over.

"If I had put it to the left or right of the fielder, then we would have been able to come back for two," he told ITV's Good Morning Britain.

"Unfortunately I hit it straight to him. I was annoyed at myself. I was angry. I thought I had thrown it away, but when I went back upstairs I had to give myself five minutes because Morgs [Morgan] asked me to go back out there."

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