Mumbai, July 8 (IANS) The Indian cricket board Wednesday decided to end its policy of allowing overseas players in all its domestic tournaments, barring the Indian Premier League (IPL).

To revamp its domestic cricket, last year BCCI allowed participation of overseas players. But now it has felt that overseas players are not needed to strengthen the domestic tournaments.

The decision was taken by the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s (BCCI) technical committee at the Cricket Centre here. The committee is headed by Sunil Gavaskar and has as members Chetan Chauhan, M.V. Sridhar, Biman Bhattacharjee, Milind Rege, Gyanendra Pandey, Kris Srikkanth, Sourav Ganguly, V.K. Ramaswamy and board secretary N. Srinivasan.

“Foreign players will not be permitted to play in domestic tournaments from the 2009-10 season onwards,” Srinivasan said.

BCCI’s chief administrative officer Ratnakar Shetty told IANS that the committee felt that there was no need for overseas players in domestic tournaments.

“It was implemented last year but the committee found that there is no need for overseas players to strengthen domestic tournaments. Our tournaments are fine and now we have lot of talented players coming up,” Shetty said.

“We also found that there wasn’t much interest among the state associations for overseas players. This year only Baroda wanted Tillakaratne Dilshan and Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) was interested in Muttiah Muralitharan. So, we finally decided to do away with overseas players from domestic tournaments,” he added.

Board secretary Srinvasan said that the number of guest-players, players from outside the state, has been reduced to three from four. Last year, the BCCI said that four guest-players, including one overseas, could be signed by state associations.

The technical committee also decided that Ranji Trophy knockout matches should be played on home and away basis, as opposed to the neutral venue system, which was in place for the last two seasons. The wickets for the knockout games would be under the charge of the BCCI’s Pitch and Grounds Committee member from the respective zone in which the match will be played.

The committee also felt that the board should make sure that its contracted players are playing for their respective states when they are not representing India in international matches.

It decided that in domestic tournaments, the ball should be changed after 34 overs during limited overs game and the Powerplay will be according to the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) rule.

A special committee comprising Gavaskar, Chauhan, Ganguly and Srikkanth will go through the pitch reports of the match referees.