10 images that defined cricket in 2018

#7 The Big Bash League heralds in a change to one of the oldest rules in cricket

Bat flip replaced coin toss to mark the beginning of a BBL game

The T20I league run by Cricket Australia - the KFC Big Bash League (BBL), has always been in the limelight for some revolutionary ideas in the sport.

The BBL was the first to feature lit-up stumps, zing bails, retractable roofs, pool-side seats, the spider cam, the batsman's cam, the umpire's cam and so on. Most of them have gone on to be incorporated by the ICC in international tournaments and contests as well, and as of now, the BBL has come up with yet another idea.

The purpose of coin-toss in a game to decide who bats first and who chooses it has a history that spreads across 141 years in the game. But from now on, coin toss in the BBL would be carried out by flipping a specially constructed bat (for 50-50 probability of results) and captains would be calling for "roofs" or "flats" instead of the traditional heads-and-tails.

The roof symbolizes the curved face of the bat, while the flats symbolize the hitting surface of a regular bat. Gully cricketers from all over the world may associate this to their age-old methods of flipping bats to decide the toss, and to be honest, they aren't really far away from this new method.