Ashes Second Test, Day 4 , Steve Smith, who was looking in such a sublime form and taking all the responsibility of Australian batting unit on his shoulders got hit by a vicious bouncer from Jofra Archer.
He was declared unfit to take part on the 5th day of test. But the interesting part was that Marnus Labuschagne came and batted in place of Steve Smith.
Most of the cricket fans were amazed by this as very few of them knew about this new rule regarding “Concussion Substitute”
So what is this Concussion Substitute? As per ICC, The ‘concussion substitution’ rule allows a team to replace a concussed player in the playing XI.
A team can have a ‘like-for-like’ replacement in case of a concussion to any player during a match. That means if you replace a pure batsman with an all rounder, the concussed player will be allowed to bat only and not bowl.
Australia became the first team to use this kind of substitute as this rule was implemented less than a month by ICC.
Basically this rule saves a team from disadvantage if some of their player gets injured during the course of match. Also it prevents the injured player from taking unnecessary risk of playing with injury.
This can be seen as a real welcome move after what we saw happened to Philip Hughes. As at the end players life and safety should always be taken as first priority in any sport.
Cricket Vikas 
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