Science for all newsletter data analysis finds a common cricket wisdom may be a myth

In cricket, few strategies are as deeply ingrained as the left-right batting combination: where of the two batters at the crease, one is left-handed and other right-handed. Coaches, commentators, and even players have argued that every time the batters switch ends when they run, the bowler and captain have to adjust their tactics and field placements.

The wisdom is that this constant change will disrupt the bowler’s rhythm and allow for more runs. However, a new working paper by economists Johan Fourie and Krige Siebrits, of Stellenbosch University in South Africa, has concluded that this wisdom might be a myth.

“This paper provides the first rigorously controlled test of cricket’s conventional wisdom that left–right batting partnerships provide a scoring advantage,” they wrote.

The duo analysed a database of 96,686 partnerships and 34 lakh deliveries across men’s international cricket — including Tests, ODIs, and T20Is — from 2001 and 2025. And they found that the left-right combination conferred no advantage.

Fourie wrote on his blog that India coach Gautam Gambhir and assistant coach Ryan ten Doeschate, as well as former South Africa captain Graeme Smith and his batting partner Herschelle Gibbs are strong supporters of the idea.

Instead, he and Siebrits found that the wisdom could have persisted because left-handed batters have been, on average, better than right-handed ones even though the latter are more common. Specifically, they reported that mixed-hand partnerships could have seemed more productive because they included very talented left-handed batters rather than because the batters disrupted the rhythm of elite bowlers.

They found this because once they controlled for the individual quality of the batsmen and for the match conditions, the putative advantage of the left-right combination vanished from the data.

Their study also took a closer look at ball-by-ball data to check whether a bowler is more likely to bowl a bad ball immediately after the batters have changed ends. According to their analysis, bowlers’ performance did drop slightly after the batsmen had switched ends — however, this did not depend on the batter’s handedness.

Put differently, bowlers would have been equally disrupted by two right-handed batters changing strike.

Finally, the analysis uncovered a potential disadvantage of sticking with a left-right combination. The duo found that the risk of a batter being dismissed was actually higher when part of a mixed-hand partnership than for a same-handed partnership. In other words, the left-right tactic could be counterproductive because it forces a batsman to play in a position where they may be less comfortable.

But the wisdom wasn’t entirely wrong, at least according to the analysis: the duo found a small exception in T20I matches. While the average benefit of the combination was still zero, mixed-hand partnerships in T20Is occasionally provided a small boost in the middle of the team’s batting innings. This, the authors figured, could be because of the highly tactical nature of this format, which incentivises match-ups against specific types of bowlers together with rules that favour batting.

But overall, Fourie and Siebrits concluded, the only wisdom that the data supported was that a team’s composition should be based on skills alone rather than include the batter’s handedness as well.