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IPL

Impact Player: the death of the all-rounder?

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Washington Sundar played 17 games for Gujarat Titans this season and bowled nine overs in all. Shivam Dube played 16 games for Chennai in 2023 without bowling a ball.

Rohit Sharma named both of them in April 2024. “I’m not a big fan of impact player,” he told Adam Gilchrist and Michael Vaughan, and warned that the rule would hold back the development of all-rounders “because eventually cricket is played by 11 players, not 12 players”. Four IPL seasons into the rule, the scorebooks have caught up with him.

Where the overs went

The Impact Player rule came in for the 2023 season. Each side can bring in a substitute during the match, so a team can pick five specialist bowlers and still bat eight or nine deep. The sixth bowler who also bats in the top seven has become a luxury.

In 2022 IPL batters in the top seven bowled 21% of the overs. This season they bowled 10%. Across the other major T20 leagues and the T20Is between Full Members, the top seven bowled 28% of the overs in 2022 and 28% again in 2026.

Overs bowled by the top sevenShare of overs bowled by players who batted in the top seven, % by calendar year. Other leagues: Vitality Blast, Big Bash, PSL, CPL, SA20, Super Smash, BPL and T20Is between Full Members

IPL 10.2Other leagues 28.0

The genuine all-rounders are going with those overs. In 2019, with eight teams, eleven players batted in the top seven for most of their games and bowled at least two overs a game: Andre Russell, Hardik and Krunal Pandya, Axar Patel, Ravindra Jadeja, Sunil Narine, Moeen Ali, Sam Curran, Dwayne Bravo, Chris Morris and Mohammad Nabi. In 2025, with ten teams, there were four: Axar, Hardik, Jadeja and Narine.

This season there were six, and five of them had played in the IPL by 2016. Nithish Kumar Reddy, who made his debut for Sunrisers in May 2023, is the only one to have come through since the rule arrived.

What the extra batter bought

The IPL got the runs it was after. Chris Gayle’s 175 not out carried Royal Challengers to 263 against Pune Warriors in 2013, and that stood as the IPL’s highest total for eleven years. Eight totals have gone past it since, all of them from 2024 on, and five of them by Sunrisers Hyderabad. Totals of 200 or more went from 18 in 2022 to 63 this season.

The run rate rose from 8.5 an over in 2022 to 9.9 this season. Across the other leagues it rose from 8.4 to 8.7 over the same four years. Whatever else is pushing scores up around the world, the IPL’s extra jump came with its twelfth player.

The IPL against the restRuns an over by calendar year, full 20-over matches. Other leagues: Vitality Blast, Big Bash, PSL, CPL, SA20, Super Smash, BPL and T20Is between Full Members

IPL 9.9Other leagues 8.7

Before the rule, IPL scoring had crept. Teams made 7.8 runs an over in the first six seasons and 8.3 from 2014 to 2022, with the growth coming in the last five overs. Half of all first-innings totals from 2008 to 2013 were 160 or fewer. This season teams scored 10.1 an over in the powerplay, faster than the death overs in any of those first six seasons.

IPL scoring by phase, season by seasonRuns an over in the powerplay (overs 1–6), middle (7–15) and death (16–20), full 20-over matches

Powerplay 10.1Middle overs 9.3Death overs 10.8

Virat Kohli saw where that came from. “I know there is a batsman coming in at No. 8 as well,” he told Jio Cinema in May 2024, and he has batted like it. His strike rate went from 116 in 2022 to 167 this season, when the IPL average was 156.

Abhishek Sharma is the purest product of the rule. He struck at 133 for Sunrisers in 2022, then at 204 in 2024 and 205 this season. Since 2023 his strike rate of 191 is the highest of any IPL batter to face 600 balls, against the league average of 150.

The 2025 mega auction in Jeddah put two captains side by side. Punjab Kings paid ₹26.75 crore for Shreyas Iyer, and a few minutes later Lucknow Super Giants paid ₹27 crore for Rishabh Pant. Iyer has since made 1,095 runs at a strike rate of 174 and led Punjab to the 2025 final. Pant has made 549 at 131, against an IPL average of about 155 over those two seasons.

The bowlers left to cope

Kohli’s case against the rule came down to one line: “Not every team has a Bumrah or a Rashid Khan or a mystery bowler.” The seasons since have split his two examples apart.

Jasprit Bumrah has gone further clear of the field. From 2019 to 2022 he conceded 1.2 runs an over fewer than the IPL average, and since 2023 he has conceded 2.3 fewer. Even Bumrah went for 8.2 an over in 2026, his most expensive season since 2015, in a year when the league average was 9.7.

Rashid Khan has gone the other way. He was two runs an over cheaper than the average from 2019 to 2022 and has been 0.6 cheaper since, with an IPL economy rate that rose from 6.2 to 8.8. Some of that is Rashid: in his other T20 cricket over the same years, his economy rate rose from 6.7 to 7.5. The rest is the IPL, where sides with a batter to spare can go after the best leg-spinner of his generation.

The all-rounders still standing mostly bowl well enough to hold a place as bowlers alone. Axar, Jadeja and Krunal, three of this season’s six, and Narine, one of 2025’s four, all sit further below the average now than they did before the rule. Seamers in the middle overs have had it hardest, going from 8.0 an over in 2014–22 to 9.3 since.

Who kept the runs downRuns an over cheaper than the IPL average, 2023–26, with each bowler’s 2019–22 figure (100 overs in each spell)
  1. Jasprit Bumrah · was +1.22+2.29
  2. Sunil Narine · was +1.40+2.19
  3. Axar Patel · was +1.30+1.50
  4. Ravindra Jadeja · was +0.92+1.40
  5. Krunal Pandya · was +0.76+1.39
  6. Varun Chakravarthy · was +0.97+1.13
  7. Ravichandran Ashwin · was +0.73+1.10
  8. Bhuvneshwar Kumar · was +0.56+0.67
  9. Rashid Khan · was +1.98+0.64
  10. Mohammed Siraj · was −0.47+0.60
  11. Yuzvendra Chahal · was +0.75+0.19
  12. Kagiso Rabada · was −0.01−0.31
  13. Arshdeep Singh · was −0.16−0.38
  14. Harshal Patel · was +0.07−0.45
  15. Avesh Khan · was +0.09−0.69
  16. Shardul Thakur · was −0.93−1.29

Defending 160

“Exciting is that you can defend 160 as well,” Kohli said in 2024. Sides batting first defended 160 or fewer 53 times in the first six IPL seasons. In four seasons of the Impact Player they have done it seven times.

The finals have stayed smaller than the league. Sunrisers, among the fastest-scoring sides of 2024, were bowled out for 113 in that year’s final. Royal Challengers won their first title in 2025 by defending 190, and won again in May by chasing 156 against Gujarat with two overs to spare.

The verdict

The Impact Player rule did what it was brought in to do. It gave every side an extra batter, and IPL scoring rose by 1.3 runs an over in four seasons while the rest of T20 cricket rose by 0.3. The overs to pay for it came out of the top order. IPL batters in the top seven now bowl a tenth of the overs, and in the other leagues they still bowl more than a quarter.

The all-rounders the IPL already had are mostly still there. Axar, Jadeja and Krunal learned the job before 2023 and now bowl well enough to hold a place as bowlers alone. Behind them, one young player in four seasons, Nithish Kumar Reddy, has come through as a top-order batter who bowls his overs. Dube and Sundar, the two Rohit named, now play as batters who can bowl if they are asked, and they are rarely asked.

So the rule has not killed the all-rounder yet. It has stopped the IPL making new ones, which was Rohit’s worry for India’s side in 2024. The night before this year’s final, Sachin Tendulkar told the ESPNcricinfo awards that “the impact player needs to go away”. The BCCI asked the ten franchises for their views by 31 August and will decide before IPL 2027.

If the rule goes, sides will want an all-rounder back in their top seven. The IPL has only six of them to go round, and the job the rule took away would be there again for the next Dube or Sundar to claim.

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