An SA study finds no advantage in backing the right-left batting combo. But a data scientist says take a deeper look

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.