Shubman Gill and Ashish Nehra offered different views.
Gujarat Titans captain Shubman Gill and coach Ashish Nehra have contrasting views on the Impact Player rule ahead of IPL 2026. Gill was very clear that it’s not required because the rule takes away the skill from the game, making the game one-dimensional.
“Personally, for me, I don’t think there should be an impact player. I think cricket in general is an 11-player game. And on wickets where we play, on the grounds that we play, adding an extra batsman, I think it takes the skill out of the game. There is a certain skill in the game that you need to have. When you know you have certain amount of batters, and if a couple of your batters get out, there is an amount of skill that you need to have to still get the scoreboard moving and get your team to a good score. I think with that one extra player, it’s making the game more one-dimensional, and it’s taking a little bit of the skill out of the game.”
Meanwhile, Ashish feels that the Impact Player rule doesn’t change anything because the game is still played with the same equipment. While he acknowledged that teams get an extra batter, the GT head coach feels that pitches might have a greater role than having more players in the side.
“I agree that there’s an Impact Player rule, and the ball also gets wet; you surely factor all those things. But the pitches where the ball swings or turns are no longer made. I still don’t think the game has moved an inch when it comes to T20 cricket. Even if there’s an Impact Player rule, 300 is not scored in every game because the main batters playing in the top can only help a team score big. It doesn’t matter if you have eight or nine batters,” said Nehra on the ‘Aava de’ show.
While Shubman Gill and Ashish Nehra’s opinions sound contradictory to an extent, both have made valid points about the Impact Player rule. As for Gill, he is right about the skill part; batters do play with more freedom knowing that there’s more than enough depth in the batting unit and go harder.
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That’s why the teams go hard even in the middle overs and don’t stop even when wickets fall in tandem at any stage. So, this takes away the art of innings construction by minimising risks and still maintaining the run rate, something the likes of Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers used to do in their primes.
Meanwhile, Nehra’s point also remains true: the pitches have gone flat across venues, and bowlers hardly get anything to work with, which results in big scores. Teams like Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) haven’t shied from accepting that they want to play on belters, even if that means their bowlers concede aplenty.
However, the scores have come down whenever the pitch has had something to offer, which was a reason why SRH struggled to adjust in 2025 when they didn’t get out-and-out flat decks at home and away. At the moment, the league needs to scrap the Impact Player rule and ask teams to play on more sporting wickets to reinstate balance between bat and ball.
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