When is a Powerplay not a Powerplay?

When it's a Powerstruggle, a Powerslide, a Dourplay, a Cowerplay or any of the other equally inventive names submitted to our OBO as England's batsmen once more made an unseemly mess of what is theoretically supposed to be a device to assist the batting side against Bangladesh on Friday.

While England are perhaps the team most pathologically suspicious of the batting Powerplay, they are far from alone in making a mess of things when it comes to playing the joker.

India's astonishing and ultimately decisive slump from 267-1 to 296 all out against South Africa in a thrilling World Cup game controversially not involving the English was precipitated by the Powerplay which is proving as likely to bring a flurry of wickets as a flood of boundaries.

The Powerplay is clearly not working properly for batting teams. And, worse still, it's not doing what the ICC wanted it to do anyway.

The two five-over Powerplays were introduced because the middle overs of one-day games had become dull, predictable affairs in which jobbing spinners and dibbly-dobblers were knocked around for singles by batting sides looking to conserve resources for a late slog. You could watch the first 15 and last 10 overs of an innings and be reasonably confident you'd missed little of note or consequence in the meantime.

These new Powerplays were initially in the hands of the bowling side, but that didn't work: they were nearly always taken immediately, merely delaying the mid-innings lull by five overs.

So one of the Powerplays was then put in the batsmen's hands. And that hasn't worked either.

The bowling Powerplay is still always taken straight away (except when Shahid Afridi forgets). And with most sides terrified of its wicket-causing properties, the batting one is predominantly (badly) used in the final overs when the slog's on anyway.

And the middle overs remain nurdle-fests. So what to do?

There are, as I see it, two options. The first and most obvious is to introduce a rule that the Powerplays must be taken somewhere between overs 15 and 40.

But that's a fudge, imposing yet more rules that just make ODIs yet more regimented and restricted.

No, better to go the other way and remove such restrictions altogether.

This is it: the surefire plan to save ODI cricket. It's not about cutting 50 overs to 40 or poorly-named gimmicks. It's much more simple than that. It's deregulation.

Take away every senseless restriction placed on the fielding side. (And it is always the fielding side restricted in this Batsman's Game; the bowling Powerplay doesn't force batsmen to score only on the offside, or use a special narrower blade, or try to pick a gap while giving a piggyback to an overexcited toddler who has been fed a quart of Red Bull ice cream.)

Remove the Powerplays altogether. Remove the fielding restrictions, discard the 30-yard circle. And, most importantly, dispose of the nonsensical restrictions on bowlers.

It's time to deregulate one-day internationals. Let captains captain; let them decide where best to deploy their fielders with the same freedom they enjoy in first-class cricket.

The Powerplay experiment may be a failure, but it remains instructive: why do batting teams a) leave it so long to take the Powerplay? and b) so frequently make a mess of it once they do?

The answer must surely be that they are quite happy ticking along with ones and twos during those middle overs and don't much care for the forced gear change brought about by the fielding restrictions.

So fielding captains, if they have any wit or brio at all, should learn soon enough that bringing an extra fielder or two up on the one even when the rules don't explicitly tell them they must might not in fact be the very definition of madness.

We've seen glimpses of it in this World Cup, with Ireland's impressive skipper William Porterfield often prepared to bring a fifth or even sixth fielder up inside the circle to make batsmen who had been comfortably knocking the ball around do something different.

Others will follow. Inventiveness will win out.

Let a captain put nine men on the boundary if he wants. The batting team will score 370 if they're not stupid.

But while giving captains freedom over their field placings is a good start, giving them freedom over their bowlers will truly set one-day cricket free and see it soar.

Of all the artifices imposed on one-day cricket that make it a less absorbing spectacle than Tests, this is the worst.

Cricket is at its most compelling when a top-class bowler duels with a top-class batsman. The potential for thrilling individual contests within a team framework is a key part of what separates cricket from other, inferior sporting pursuits. One-day cricket actively seeks to stifle this USP by arbitrarily limiting each bowler's contribution to one-fifth of the innings total.

Removing the unhelpful restriction that demands five bowlers be used in equal quantities will do two things to team selection: allow teams to pick fewer but higher-class bowlers and, thusly, more proper batsmen.

Both measures should see an increase in the occasions when a proper bowler is bowling at a proper batsman. And that, surely, can only improve the quality of cricket on offer.

There you have it. Simple. Get rid of the restrictive rules that are choking the one-day game and let the cricket breathe.

It's the only way to save ODIs. Apart from insisting that all games feature England; and even the ECB are unlikely to sign off on that schedule.