Shikhar Dhawan-Rohit Sharma partnership has shown much promise to be among the best Indian openers in ODIs

Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma opening partnership has been a huge asset for India in the recent past. The left-right combination have all the right ingredients to be among the most successful opening combination in One-Day Internationals: running between the wickets, shot selection and ability to construct huge partnerships. And they are both destructive.

By Sarang Bhalerao

Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma opening partnership has been a huge asset for India in the recent past. The left-right combination have all the right ingredients to be among the most successful opening combination in One-Day Internationals: running between the wickets, shot selection and ability to construct huge partnerships. And they are both destructive.

The Indian opening partnerships over the few years have been the talking point because of their ability to take the game away from the opposition in a matter of few overs. When Sachin Tendulkar opened the batting for the first time in 1994 he presented a new dimension to the batting all-together. The 15-over field restriction rule was taken advantage of. Tendulkar, over the years, stitched memorable partnerships with Sourav Ganguly and Virender Sehwag.

List of the top Indian opening partnerships

	Partnership	I	R	HS	Ave	100s	50s
1	Ganguly-Tendulkar	136	6609	258	49.32	21	23
2	Sehwag-Tendulkar	93	3919	182	42.13	12	18
3	Gambhir-Sehwag	38	1870	201*	50.54	5	7
4	Gavaskar-Srikkanth	55	1680	136	30.54	2	11
5	Ganguly-Sehwag	43	1625	196	39.63	5	6
6	Jadeja-Tendulkar	22	1315	176	59.77	5	7
7	Shastri-Srikkanth	32	1135	188	35.46	3	5
8	Dhawan-Rohit	15	849	176	56.6	4	2

 

As one can see, Tendulkar has been involved in three of the top eight partnerships. In terms of average, his partnership with Jadeja yielded almost 59 per innings. Dhawan and Rohit are eighth on the list, but it’s still early days; they have opened the batting just 15 times, but have registered four century stands and two half-century partnership in that period.

As they say good start is half the battle won. The opening partnership is of paramount importance as the solid foundation helps the middle-order immensely.

List of the top Indian opening partnerships in wins

	Partnership	I	R	Ave	Overall	Deviation	% wins	%runs in wins
1	Ganguly-Tendulkar	65	4281	67.95	49.32	18.63	47.79	64.77
2	Sehwag-Tendulkar	52	2648	50.92	42.13	8.79	55.91	67.56
3	Gambhir-Sehwag	25	1519	63.29	50.54	12.75	65.78	81.22
4	Ganguly-Sehwag	22	1164	58.2	39.63	18.57	51.16	71.63
5	Gavaskar-Srikkanth	31	1158	37.35	30.54	6.81	56.36	68.92
6	Jadeja-Tendulkar	12	1025	85.41	59.77	25.64	54.54	77.95
7	Dhawan-Rohit	12	786	65.5	56.6	8.9	80	92.58

 

As you can see when Dhawan and Rohit have scored almost 93 per cent of their total runs in winning cause. India have won 80 per cent of the matches (12 out of 15) when the duo has opened. They average about nine per cent points higher when India wins.

The most drastic deviation in terms of averages has been observed in Tendulkar-Ajay Jadeja partnership. They averaged nearly 86 when India won and otherwise they scored about 60 runs per innings.

(Sarang Bhalerao hails from a family of doctors, but did his engineering. He then dumped a career in IT with Infosys to follow his heart and passion and became a writer with CricketCountry. A voracious reader, Sarang aspires to beat Google with his knowledge of the game! You can follow him on Twitter here)

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