Around the time IPL 2026 began, Johan Fourie, South African economist and chair of Economics, History and Policy at Stellenbosch University published a post on his Our Long Walk.com substack titled, ‘The Invisible Hand at the Crease’. Its subtitle was ‘Why Gautam Gambhir’s favourite cricket strategy is a myth’. Fourie referenced Gambhir from his assistant coach Ryan Ten Doeschate’s statements about the India coach’s white-ball strategy fundamentals—e.g. the left-right batting combo.
The right-left combo is a white-ball staple, reinforced by T20. The received wisdom says mixed-hand batters require bowlers to change their lines, adjust lengths and field placements. Fourie describes it as, “not a minor tweak—but a geometric reconfiguration.” Except Fourie and his Stellenbosch University colleague Krige Siebrits (associate professor of economics) argue in their working paper titled, “Invisible Handedness: the myth of left-right batting partnerships” that the l-r-combo theory is not supported by numbers. At all.
Fourie and Siebrits studied ball-by-ball data from every international match across Tests, ODIs and T20Is from 2001 to 2025. That’s 3.4m deliveries and 96,686 partnerships. They worked with Claude Code, an AI-powered coding assistant, to run various tests which is non-economist Mandarin: “regressions with match-by-innings fixed effects, ball-level mechanism tests, survival analysis, quantile regressions and randomisation inference.”
Fourie and Siebrits say the “effect of mixed-hand partnerships” on eventual team totals is actually zero. Okay, very, very close to zero. The difference of mixed-hand partnerships in Tests is -0.04 runs, that’s minus 0.4 runs less than the runs scored by two right-handers or two left-handers. In ODIs, that is -0.10 runs less and 0.19-plus in T20Is. Or as the profs say, “not statistically significant”.
Fourie’s blog says the belief in mixed-hand magic is tri-fold. The first, confirmation bias– “coaches see a mixed partnership succeed and credit the hand combination. When it fails, the pitch, the bowling or bad luck.” The second is “motivated reasoning” – coaches who have “built batting orders around the left-right doctrine have reputational incentives” to stick to it. “Admitting it was wrong means admitting past selection errors.” Selective observation is the third, i.e. not looking closer at the scoreboard numbers that support the belief. All of these echo resoundingly through cricket’s general decision-making maze.
In this year’s IPL, only Gujarat Titans, Mumbai Indians and Punjab Kings have regular mixed-hand opening pairs. So, is the lure of the left-right combo waning? It’s best to check with cricket folk who deep dive into data whether Fourie-Siebrits’ conclusion rings true.
Himanish Ganjoo, data scientist, analyst and cricket writer worked with the Indian cricket team from 2022 to 2024. He went through Fourie-Siebrits’ working paper and found the methodology driven by economics and econometrics-centred. “And I’m not an economist, won’t go into those details” he said, but added that the study was “a lot more rigorous than any other cricket analysis.”
Paris-based Ganjoo is cosmologist by vocation, currently working on dark energy in the universe.
Cricket analysis, he says, is “just basically reporting averages of x, y and z” along with the sport’s many degrees of data difficulty. “On average in cricket, it is very difficult to glean a signal out of anything because there are so many variations and contextual factors.” Arriving at a clear-cut conclusion is difficult, “because on average, you get nothing.” He is not surprised then that Fourie-Siebrits too on average, “get to the conclusion that there is no difference between left-right and right-right, etc.”
Yet in T20 particularly, Ganjoo says, partnership-runs is not the most useful metric to judge the success of mixed-hand partnerships. Strike-rate is but detailed strike-rate analysis is not part of the working paper. Left-right partnerships, he says, “are constructed by the coach to take advantage of something. And unless you look at those situations in isolation, it’s very hard to sort of conclude that these are not effective.”
Like for example, “If the opposition has only one kind of bowler in their attack, playing two left-handed spinners maybe, then I make sure they get a left-right combination.” Every situation that brings about the mixed-hand partnership, “needs to be isolated to assess the usefulness of the partnership.” The working paper, granular and rigorous as it was, did not, he says test the efficacy of the mixed-hand partnership in individual situations, which may give the left-right combo an advantage. Surely, you can’t pull those individual situations out of 3.4m balls and 96,000-plus partnerships? “You can,” Ganjoo says, “but they haven’t done it.”
Also, Ganjoo points out that the conventional belief behind the mixed-hand partnerships— Fourie’s ‘geometric re-alignment’—is not the centrepiece. While the researchers, he says, “have disproved the ‘changing lines’ theory in this paper, not the main reason you want to have left-right partnerships—that reason of bowlers having to switch their lines and all.” In T20 for example, he says, “the reason is simply that you want the ball turning into the batter. It’s actually that the batter wants to face spin that comes in. You want to minimise that as a bowling side and maximise that as a batting side–and that’s the reason.”
The other factoid out of this enormous study is that left-left partnerships score more than mixed-hand or right-right partnerships. But that’s another rabbit hole of data about the value of left-handers per se discussed at length in Nathan Leamon and Ben Jones’ 2021 book Hitting Against the Spin. And which is why the Indians went looking for white-ball left-handers over the last four-odd years, to the point that we are now surfeit and their runs are coming in the IPL at a rate of surplus.