"Don’t think the rule will affect the all-rounders"- Rohit Sharma has his say on the 'Impact Player' rule ahead of IPL 2023

Mumbai Indians (MI) skipper Rohit Sharma believes that even after the introduction of the 'Impact Player' rule, the all-rounders will remain as important as they always were.

There has been a lot of talk about how teams could look at playing specialist bowlers and replacing them with a batter as an impact player or vice versa, thereby affecting the utility of the all-rounders.

But in the pre-season press conference, here's what Rohit Sharma had to say about the importance of fielding your strongest XI irrespective of what the new rule is:

"I don’t think the rule will affect the all-rounders. An all-rounder will remain an all-rounder and will give you the option to bowl him and make him bat anytime. With that 12th player, you can fill that gap of having 6th bowler or an extra batter. In hindsight you can say that, but you still want to put your best players on the park. I don’t think it will impact so much in terms of having all-rounders in the team or not."

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Rohit Sharma on learning about the Impact Player rule

Rohit Sharma likes the idea of an innovative rule like Impact Player becoming a part of the IPL 2023 season. He is also fascinated by the idea that the impact players list along with the XI can be given after the toss, which makes it even easier to strategize.

On this, Rohit stated:

"I think it’s interesting to have a new sort of innovation in the game. Only time will tell what happens and how teams cope up but I like the idea of an impact player coming in and changing the game after the toss. I like it. Let’s see what happens, luckily for us we will be playing the last among those playing in the first round of games. So we will be watching what the teams will do and probably get some ideas from the games that happen before us."

Mumbai Indians will open their IPL 2023 campaign against the Royal Challengers Bangalore on Sunday, April 2.