How teams have tried to take the bite off spinners

IPL franchises used left-hand/right-hand batting combinations to effectively negate the ball turning away

The concept of the righthand/left-hand combination benefitting the batting side is nothing new. In first-class cricket, the received wisdom was that having to chop and change between bowling to right and left-handed batsmen meant the bowler couldn’t get settled on a line and length. In T20 cricket, the most commonly cited benefit of the right-hand/ left-hand combination is to negate match-ups. By having a right-hander and a left-hander at the crease, it’s harder for sides to target a batsman with the ball spinning away; an off-spinner attacking a left-hander is ideal, but they’re only a single away from bowling to a right-hander.

There was controversy when AB de Villiers came to bat at No 6 for RCB in their eight-wicket defeat to KXIP because the management was concerned about having two right-handers in the middle. In hindsight, it didn’t make much sense. Sam Curran’s position has been up for discussion throughout the season, with CSK’s lack of left-handers making him the sole option when they were trying to get those different-handed partnerships (DHP). Some teams have rigidly stuck to the tactic.

At the start of this season, Capitals were rotating Shreyas Iyer and Shimron Hetmyer at No.3 and No.4, with either coming in first drop depending on whether Prithvi Shaw (RHB) or Shikhar Dhawan (LHB) fell first.

But is there actually any benefit from this tactic? It’s not definitive but the numbers are there to explore. For ease of reference, we will refer to RHB/LHB partnerships as DHPs, and both RHB/RHB and LHB/LHB partnerships as same-handed partnerships (SHP). We will also be looking only at partnerships involving batsmen No.1-7.

Statistics suggest DHPs score a fraction quicker than SHPs, about 1.5 runs more across the length of the partnership, and hit a fraction more boundaries.

However, when we break this down a little further, we can spot some more interesting trends. As we have outlined, the primary benefit of the DHP is the ability to manage match-ups, but specifically match-ups against spin.

There’s clear evidence that having differently-handed batsmen makes a substantial difference to scoring rates against spin. It’s no surprise then that when you look at the comparison of partnerships only against spin, we see a much greater disparity. DHPs score substantially quicker against spin than SHPs, and hit considerably more boundaries. They don’t last as long, but the increased scoring rate accounts for that. The most obvious reason for this is that batsmen in DHPs face more of the bowling they want to. In SHPs, 25.2% of the balls batsmen face from spin are good matchups for them (i.e. the ball spinning in). In DHPs, that figure jumps to 50.5%.

Having established there is some advantage to having righthanders and left-handers batting together, it’s natural to ask which teams do it best?

In the last three seasons of IPL, Mumbai have used RH/LH partnerships more than any other side, with 70% of their partnerships for the first five wickets being DHPs. That could of course be nothing more than having quite a few prominent left-handers in their set-up, with Quinton de Kock, Krunal Pandya and Ishan Kishan all playing a lot of matches in the last three years. However, that’s not the case. Just 16% of the balls faced by the top seven batsmen have been by left-handers, the lowest of any side. But there is no doubt that Mumbai have managed their match-ups very well.

So next time the importance of RH/LH partnerships is cited, it’s worth remembering that they are more important against spin than pace, and that they are more important for scoring quickly than building long partnerships. There is value in them but probably not to the detriment of having a better player in the middle, and overreliance on it as tactic could be counter-productive.