The importance of openers in one-day internationals

Arvind Iyengar explains why opening combinations are crucial to the success of teams in the 50-over format.

On Castrol Cricket’s Expert Fan Speak section, Ashan Vijay asked an interesting question about the growing importance of openers in ODIs. We decided to take a deeper look at the numbers and interpret what they tell us.

First, we consider ODIs played in the past 2 years. The table below outlines the matches played and Win/Loss ratios for the top 10 teams in ODIs. Australia heads the list with India in second place.

Next, we consider average and strike-rate of all openers for these sides over the past two years. The Batting Momentum,a comprehensive measure of overall batting performance which incorporates the effect of average and strike-rate has also been computed. Here’s a number for you - in the past 24 months, India has used 9 openers in total with Sehwag opening in 38 matches, Gambhir in 34, Tendulkar in 25 and six others with 10 or fewer opening appearances (kudos if you can name all six!).

The Men in Blue top the charts while Australia, the team with the best Win-Loss ratio, is in fourth place. For the stat geeks, the correlation between the Win-Loss ratio and Openers Average is 75%, and the correlation is 69% with Batting Momentum. Overall, that would seem to indicate that the openers tend to have a somewhat significant impact in determining team success, but you don’t necessarily need to have the best openers in order to win.

Of course, there is an inherent bias in some of the above numbers - India tend to play more matches in batting-friendly conditions at home compared to Australia which plays in tougher batting conditions on average, which makes the absolute numbers hard to compare. In order to truly measure the impact of openers over and above the rest of the team, we look at the average of openers with respect to the average of the rest of the team. For instance, India’s openers average 45.20 in ODIs in the past two years while the entire Indian team has averaged 40.52 in the same time span, indicating the Opener Average to Team Average ratio is 1.12. This gives us a sense of how valuable openers are to the entire squad.

Australia is last in the above table! Similar numbers with Strike-rates and Batting Momentum reveal that Sri Lanka, India and New Zealand rely most heavily on their openers while Australia, England and Bangladesh do not. This Opener/Team ratio then ends up having close to no correlation on Win-Loss ratio which seems to suggest that openers alone, relative to the strength of the entire squad, have a limited impact on a side’s overall success rate.

In short, it’s a no-brainer to say a team is likely to get better if they get better openers, all else remaining equal. But teams that rely heavily on their openers will not necessarily be more successful, Sri Lanka is a great example of that. Good starts help, and while they may be a key determinant of success in T20s, in ODIs well begun is far from half done!