Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s batting coach and mentor Dinesh Karthik wants the Impact Player rule to stay intact at least for the upcoming IPL 2027, calling that scrapping the contentious rule in the middle of an IPL cycle would not “make sense”.
Speaking to Cricbuzz, he stated that the teams have built their squads with the impact player rule in their minds, highlighting that taking it away in the middle of an IPL cycle would not be sensible. But strangely, this last season, there were not too many close games. “It just felt like one team scored a lot, and another team ended up chasing it down. And if you look at how the impact player rule has impacted the IPL, it was quite positive at the start. He highlighted that the rule has made an impact on India not being able to produce many all-rounders. “It helped make the game more high-scoring than what it was. So it makes a lot of sense. “But I just feel that, as a rule, whatever new rule you want to bring in, you need to bring it in at the start of a cycle and do away with it at the end of a cycle if you don’t want to (continue). First of all, this impact player rule was brought in in between and then to do away with it in the middle of one, I don’t think makes sense. That’s all I would say,” he added.
Because there were high-scoring games and there were a lot of teams that were almost chasing it down, “When it first came on (Impact Player rule), it was very good. Because teams have been picked with having an impact player in mind, “But what I wouldn’t want is it to be scrapped for this season. “When you pick a team, you’re picking a team based on 12 players that you’re going to play. Now suddenly if you make it 11, there could be a team which is obviously not as strong as a 12 but much better as an 11, and it is an unfair advantage, and it’s something that they could do away with after the end of this season.
Karthik, although, criticised the rule for “reducing the chances for India to produce all-rounders”, but batted for the rule to stay in IPL 2027. But slowly but steadily, it started losing the charm and the reason why it was there,” Karthik told Cricbuzz. But it definitely decreased the chances of India as a cricketing country producing all-rounders,” he said before wanting the rule to stay this season.
