The Impact Player rule has been a pivotal talking point among experts and fans in the previous few weeks.
The Impact Player rule has been a pivotal talking point among experts and fans in the previous few weeks. This edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) has seen a massive surge in the scoring rate, and the introduction of an additional player has a significant role to play.
Talking on the Club Prairie Fire Podcast, the Indian captain Rohit Sharma opinionated the Impact Player rule is holding the allrounders back. While he accepted that people are getting entertained, Rohit explained that this rule is not beneficial for Indian cricket in the long term.
“I generally feel that it is going to hold back [allrounders] because eventually cricket is played by 11 players, not 12 players. I’m not a big fan of Impact Player. You are taking out so much from the game just to make it a little entertaining for the people around. But if you look [at] genuinely just cricketing aspect of it… I can give you so many examples – guys like Washington Sundar (and) Shivam Dube are not getting to bowl, which for us [India team] is not a good thing.”
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While Shivam Dube has been on fire with the willow in the IPL since the last edition, he has barely bowled for Chennai Super Kings (CSK). In fact, CSK have used him as an impact player only since they have a better bowler to use in his place.
Rohit Sharma added he is still determining what can be done about this Impact Player rule. However, he is not a fan of it because the team has 12 players to play with.
“I don’t know what you can do about it, but I’m not a fan of it [the rule] honestly speaking,” he said. “Because there’s obviously 12 players for you to select from and whoever that impact player is, you can see how the game is going and change it later depending on what you need, what pitch is behaving.”
Concluding his point, Rohit added the teams have too many bowling options to play with. The lower-order batters don’t come to bat often due to the presence of an additional batter at the top.
“If you bat well – if you don’t lose wickets, you can add another bowler, so it gives you an option of having six or seven bowlers. You don’t need that extra batter because a lot of the teams actually upfront are batting well, and then you hardly see Nos. 7 or 8 coming to bat.”
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