As the match was going on at its pace, on air English commentators Ian Bishop and Darren Ganga had the opportunity to interview CSK coach Stephen Fleming about the match scenario.
Darren Ganga took the moment to ask Fleming: “The Impact player and what it has contributed towards this season of the IPL?”
We rarely see Fleming being negative about anything related to the game’s aspect but in the case of impact player, he seems to clearly disagree with what is going on.
Without thinking much he instantly replied, “It’s probably contributed a few headaches to bowling coaches and and bowling teams.”
That make sense because if you are batting second and use the rule of impact player. All this means that out of a sudden you insert a player to the field who hasn’t soaked the environment, he hasn’t felt the pitch by his own senses. It is quite obvious why the impact player rule in batting second terms hasn’t gone well.
Fleming continued, “I think in our case it’s added an extra batter. It’s certainly changed the dynamic of the game. There’s more aggression and the opportunity more be more aggressive with your batting order.”
This is clearly visible in the way the teams are now playing their game. They are going extra hard from get go because then know they have the cushion of an extra better who can make the balance if he comes in the middle order.
“Apart from that, it’s hard to see really how you can get it too much of an advantage from it. It diminishes a little bit the all rounder status, but it is what it is and we’re just trying to trying to play fast with it,” Fleming concluded.
If Fleming is right then we will see that all-rounders will have less role to play in the IPL in upcoming seasons due to this new rule. An all-rounder neither has an extreme batting ability not extreme bowling ability but it provides the balance to the team.
However, now teams can be strategic about their choices. If they are batting first so they will go for a definite batter rather than an all-rounder because they have the ability to choose who they want to go with according to the match scenario.
Even in the case of Chennai Super Kings, whenever they batted first, they had the absolute advantage of impact player rule. Not actually, but they had the advantage of playing an extra batter so there openers went hard when batting first and the piled up biggest of scores.