Delhi Capitals (DC) head coach Ricky Ponting has supported Mumbai Indians (MI) star Rohit Sharma’s views on the Impact Player rule, currently being utilized in the Indian Premier League (IPL).
The Impact Player rule was introduced in IPL 2023. Under this rule, each team can name as many as four substitute players along with their playing XI at the toss. One of them can replace a member from the original XI during the match and the player will be called Impact Player.
Speaking on the “Club Prairie Fire” podcast, Rohit recently raised his voice against the Impact Player rule, highlighting that it is holding back the all-rounders.
On the eve of DC’s match against Sunrisers Hyderabad on Saturday (April 20), Ponting said that the fans should be able to decide on the future of this contentious rule.
“Look, I think, I read some really, really interesting answers from Rohit Sharma on this yesterday. This Impact Player is taking the all-rounders out of the game a little bit,” Ponting stated.
“You know you can play your specialist batsman down till No. 8. pretty much. But look, I think for a coach and for the players, it's probably not ideal, but I think you know a lot of what this game tries to do is to entertain people," he explained.
“The T20 game is an entertainment package and it's probably better asking the spectator what they think about the impact player, because if everyone is loving the fact that teams are making, you know, 220 up to 250 in a lot of the games, and the spectators like seeing it, then it should stay.
“But if the spectators aren't liking it as much, then there's no reason why I couldn't go back to the old,” he added.
On a separate note, Ponting shared a positive update on veteran opener David Warner, who missed DC’s last match against GT due to a knuckle injury.
“David did a fitness test on game day in which he got close. He's probably sort of 85 or 90% a couple days ago. We'd expect that there would be a little bit more improvement from him today.
“But he will have to do a lot of batting today against some fast bowling stuff to make sure that the pain is not there anymore,” Ponting replied to a query from PTI.
The coach was happy with the pitch on which DC will play its first home game of the season.
“A lot more grass on the entire square than we used to see here. You know, this is the main reason that we moved away from those couple of games at the back of WPL.
“We wanted to ensure that the wickets could potentially play a bit better than they have done for us.”
(With PTI Inputs)
