IPL’s farcical substitution rule is undermining the fabric of cricket
One of the strengths of the Indian Premier League when it was launched in 2008 was that its founders did not buckle to the temptation of meddling with the actual cricket.
There were no fancy gimmicks or new laws – doing away with lbws for example or renaming wickets as ‘outs’ as the England and Wales Cricket Board wanted to do with the Hundred.
Instead it was everything outside the field of play that changed: the first-team franchises, massive broadcast deals and the blend of Bollywood with cricket.
They soon introduced a time out, but that was never really anything other than an opportunity to squeeze yet more out of television advertisers. Last year the IPL actually started tinkering with the cricket through the introduction of the ‘impact player’ and the decision to allow teams to name their sides after the toss.
Selection is cricket’s great intellectual challenge. Captains and coaches have to be adept at reading conditions and setting up their team accordingly. They have to second guess unknowns: how the pitch will play, whether overhead conditions will affect bowling and, to a lesser extent, sometimes take weather and dew into account.
This has been lost in the IPL now. With an impact player teams can extend their line-ups. If batting second, they can substitute a bowler for an extra batsman. Batsmen can thus play with even more freedom and take risks because they know the batting line-up has been extended by the impact sub. Jos Buttler recently played as an impact sub for Rajasthan Royals, mainly to give him a rest from fielding and preserve energy for later rounds, which was not really the original idea behind it at all.
One unintended consequence could harm India at June’s T20 World Cup. The impact player rule has diminished the use of all-rounders – those batsmen who can bowl some useful overs. It has reaffirmed the specialist as all important. Why gamble a couple of overs from an all-rounder when you can replace him in the line-up when defending a total with a specialist bowler?
Because the impact sub is an IPL innovation only, the world’s premier T20 league is not preparing the national team for the format’s World Cup – a tournament they have not won since 2008 despite the rise of the IPL.
“Eventually, cricket is played by 11 players not 12 players. I am not a big fan of ‘Impact Player’, you are taking out so much from the game just because of little bit of entertainment, for people around,” said India’s T20 captain Rohit Sharma recently, a very rare case of an India player publicly disagreeing with anything to do with rule-making from above. “I can give you so many examples, guys [all-rounders] like Washington Sundar, Shivam Dube are not getting to bowl. For us, it is not a good thing you know.”
The impact player would be better if teams had to name their starting XI before the toss, not after it, so they had to take into consideration changing conditions without the knowledge of whether they are batting or bowling first.
Better still, scrap it completely and make highly paid coaches and captains rely on cricketing judgment and select an XI before the toss. It really does take something meaningful out of the game when they can cover so many bases by in effect having on standby almost an entire squad of players.
It has led to some huge scores in the IPL this season. There have been 29 above 200, eight over 250. “This [impact sub rule] gives us extra 20-30 runs. People have gotten used to how to use it. So, there’s an extra man for you when you are bowling or batting,” said Muttiah Muralitharan, the Sunrisers bowling coach, wincing at the treatment this generation of bowlers are enduring.
“For the batter, it’s more advantageous than the bowler. Because, you are not afraid of putting up a score. It’s like, ‘If I get out, there is a man behind me to cover me.’ So, there’s an extra man there, and they go play freely. When you play with the mind of a cricket player, if you put pressure on yourself, you freeze up and you don’t play; if you are free, then automatically out of 10 times, seven times it comes off. So, that’s the game every batter is doing at the moment. They are not scared of getting out.”
It also benefits the lazy and limited players. Those who do not like fielding and are known donkeys can either be subbed out when it comes to taking the field or sit on the bench waiting to bat in the second innings. Batsmen who have a weakness against a certain type of bowling, or struggle in certain phases of play, can be held back as a sub and then brought on when it suits their skillset. Cricket should be about batsmen overcoming those challenges, not hiding away.
Indian cricket has always been about batting. Their great batsmen are kings. A big swipe that only travels as far as mid-off will garner a big cheer from Indian crowds. A four or six is a televisual moment. It is inevitable a made-for-TV product like the IPL will do anything to ensure more of them. Remember, the IPL was the first league to sponsor boundaries (“the DLF Maximum”).
But it is taking away the magic of the moment. You can have too much of a good thing. Any batsman worth his salt (including Phil) have greedily tucked in. The boundary percentage has increased by four per cent since the impact player rule was introduced. Boundaries are smaller this season, outfields quicker and pitches flatter. More teams are batting first to post big scores but last week we witnessed the highest ever successful run chase when Punjab Kings made 262 at Eden Gardens against KKR with Jonny Bairstow finding his form with a 48-ball 108 (Salt had earlier hit 75 from 37).
Punjab Kings hit 24 sixes and won with more than an over to spare, overhauling a score that a generation ago would have won a 50-over game. It shows how even in the shortest format boundary-hitting has changed. At the 2009 T20 World Cup, England hit just 12 sixes in the entire tournament, while winners Pakistan struck 21 and they had Shahid Afridi.
Another reason for the high scores, and a warning to other leagues thinking of expansion, is that the addition of two extra teams to the IPL in 2022 has diluted bowling talent. There are fewer decent bowlers around able to withstand the tilting of the balance toward bat over ball. The best bowlers still sit top of the ratings: Jasprit Bumrah and Sunil Narine, for example. But there is too much fodder being sent down to create those four and six moments. Now a bowler that keeps an economy rate below 10 is doing pretty well.
Perhaps it does not matter. Can you have too much of Buttler hitting sixes? The crowds are massive for the IPL, television audiences continue to break records and it is a slick, superb sporting product that attracts the best players and is not afraid to innovate.
English cricket was sent into another round of navel gazing recently just because a ball with fewer stitches on the seam (the Kookaburra) was used in the opening rounds of the championship. English cricket could be about to split apart over private ownership, something that launched the IPL 17 years ago to much scoffing and scepticism at ECB towers where instead they decided a deal with Allen Stanford would be better.
But for all its good innovations, the IPL can keep the impact player rule. It’s one move too far. Time to respect the old ways and respect selection as a skill of its own.
