V Gangadhar: Opening Batsmen Hunt In Pairs (18 Nov 1996)

18 November 1996

Opening batsmen hunt in pairs

V Gangadhar

Familiarity, goes the saying, breeds contempt. Not so, though, among established opening pairs in cricket. In fact, they enjoy the feeling of familiarity. After all, there are not many successful, established opening partners in the game. And the duos that do business like nothing better than developing more understanding between themselves in areas like running between the wickets, adjusting their techniques to blunt the opposition and even rooming together.

Any international side which has an established, successful opening pair is lucky. Sometimes, the think tanks of such teams, for some bizarre reason, tamper with such arrangements and suffer the consequences. Take the case of the Pakistani pair, Saeed Answar and Aamir Sohail, the best opening pair in the world, both in one-dayers and test cricket. Both are freestroking left-handers. Today, Anwar is on top of the world and Sohail plods along, giving him support. But there have been times when Anwar played a secondary role while Sohail blazed along.

Yet recently, the opening pair were separated twice. That was the time when Pakistan cricket was in turmoil and captains changed like the French premiers during the 1950`s. In one Sharjah tournament, Anwar batted at number six while his original position was usurped by Salim Elahi. The Pakistanis sorely missed Anwar when they toured Australia, and Elahi made a poor substitute. More recently, the Pakistanis promoted pinch hitter Shahid Afridi to open with Anwar because Sohail tended to get tied down a bit. But Afirdi lacked the basic techniques for the opening slot and often threw his wicket away. Fortunately, better sense prevailed in the end, and the opening pair was reunited during the just concluded Champions Trophy in Sharjah, which Pakistan won convincingly. The Anwar-Sohail pair clicked, and led from the front.

It is always unwise to separate a well established opening pair. When Afridi opened with Anwar, the little left hander was forced to change his basic technique to keep pace with the big hitting of the former. It did not work out. Anwar and Sohail, however, complement each other wonderfully. The batsman in form gets more of the strike and there is a kind of intuition in their running between the wickets. If Pakistan wanted to climb to the number one spot in world cricket, they would do well to stick to the Anwar-Sohail combination.

One of the major reasons for the West Indian domination of the game for nearly 15 years was the role played by first Gordon Greenidge and Roy Fredericks, and then Greenidge and Desmond Haynes. Haynes did appear a bit shaky in his earlier days, but the West Indian selectors recognised his potential and persisted with him. The results spoke for themselves.

In earlier days too, attempts to split up successful opening pairs were not successful. During the 1940s and early 1950s, England`s Len Hutton and Cyril Washbrook were regarded as the best opening batsmen in the game. When England under Freddie Brown toured Australia in 1950-51, the team management decided to push Hutton down the order to strengthen the middle order. Reg Simpson, who normally batted numebr three, was promoted to the opening slot. The experiment failed dismally. Washbrook appeared lost without his usual partner, and Hutton was left without any support at the end of the innings. After two Test matches, the experiment was given up and the regular opening pair was back in action. A much relieved Reg Simpson, batting at number three, hit a tremendous 156 not out in the final Test at Melbourne, enabling England to beat Australia for the first time in 13 years. Hutton himself batted magnificantly throughout the series but excelled more as an opener.

Australia`s Geoff Marsh and David Boon formed an excellent opening partnership during the 1980s. Boon attacked the bowling more while Marsh was the dour, dependable kind. But the selectors could not ignore the claims of high-scoring New South Wales opener Mark Taylor, who possessed the additional advan- tage of being left handed. Taylor replaced Boon, who was asked to bat number three. The experiment was neither successful nor unsuccessful, but Marsh always played better in the company of Boon, who was versatile enough to bat well in any position. Taylor, a stodgy batsmen, was not considered for one dayers during the early part of his career. Boon and Marsh did the job for Australia.

Cricket is also full of examples of outstanding but unlucky opening batsmen who could not play much of international cricket because the selectors (quite rightly) did not want to break up established opening partnerships. Take Jack Robertson of Middlesex, who died recently. Now, Robertson who scored heavily in county cricket, found very few chances in test cricket because of the dominance of the Hutton-Washbrook combination. He did play in India with Nigel Howard`s team in 1951-`52 only because neither Hutton nor Washbrook made the trip.

Bardadian Roy Marshall, who played for the West Indies during the 1950`s was a similar victim. He was one of the heaviest scorers during the highly successful West Indian tour of England in 1950 and also did fairly well when the team went to Australia the next year. But Marshall had to fret because the West Indians did not want to disturb the established Allan Rae-Jeffrey Stollmeyer combination. Finally, Marshall was so frustrated at the lack of opportunities that he opted to play county cricket for Hampshire and was lost to West Indian cricket.

Bill Brown of Queensland, Australia, was Jack Fingleton`s opening partner during the late 1930`s, but after the war he found the slots going to left hander Arthur Morris and right hander Syd Barnes. Fingleton had retired, but Brown during the English tour of 1948 was relegated to the number six slot in the first two Test matches. Mind you, Brown was in terrific form during the tour and once scored six centuries in a row against various counties. But captain Don Bradman was not prepared to disturb the highly-successful Barnes-Morris duo, Brown did not enjoy batting lower down the order and slowly vanished from the scene.

India, of course, have seldom been blessed with settled, successful opening pairs. We talk of Vijay Merchant and Mushtaq Ali, but they played too few Tests to qualify for this discussion. Merchant himself was no doubt successful against England both at home and abroad, but he played against attacks which were still suffering from the aftermath of the second World War. Made the captain for the 1947- 48 tour of Australia, which would have tested his mettle, Merchant developed a `mysterious` groin injury and withdrew from the tour party.

Much later, Sunil Gavaskar formed a successful partnership with Chetan Chauhan. But both batsmen were in the defensive mould and were followed by Dilip Vengsarkar, who took hours to get his eye in and play his strokes. India, during this period, could never score fast enough to dictate terms and perhaps that was why Chauhan was prematurely discarded in favour of the more dynamic Krish Srikkanth. Gavaskar and Srikkanth did well in one-dayers, but could not repeat their success in the longer version of the game.

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