An Investigative Yarn About Left-Handers in Cricket
There’s a regular old tale in cricket that left-handed batsmen are just better to watch. A flowing cover drive rarely looks as good as when it’s being dispatched as if through a mirror. Nobody’s entirely sure of why this is - there are theories about balance and angle of delivery - but it’s pretty much an accepted truth at this point.
Only ten percent of the population are left-handed yet if you ask your local prems coach then he/she’s probably all about those right-left combinations. Mixing it all up. Rotating the strike and forcing a shuffle in the field each time. So if you’re looking to work your way up from the reserves then trying being left-handed because that’s a prized asset in cricket these days.
Thing is, lefties may look aesthetic they and have a tactical funk to them but this isn’t some kind of fetish thing that’s letting them progress through the ranks excessively, far beyond the actual ratio of players that are left-handed. See, that idea doesn’t really hold up when you consider that of the 13 players to have scored 10,000 Test runs, five of them did it left-handed. More than a third of the club made up of only 10% of the population. Seems like there really is a genuine advantage to being a leftie.
Or how about a different way of looking at it: going through the history of Test cricket, seventeen men have held the record for runs scored but only two of the first 11 were left-handers. Then Garry Sobers broke the record in the 70s and, including him, three of the next five were lefties until Sachin Tendulkar got in the way almost ten years ago. Eleven of the 30 Test triple-centuries have been scored by LHBs, including the three highest scores of all time and five of the top seven. The record Test score by an individual hasn’t been held by a rightie since the 1950s.
Dragging the numbers back to the year 2000, here’s how righties vs lefties stock up going by Test batsmen coming in in the top seven of the batting order:
RIGHT – 459 players | 13,288 innings | 37.49 average | 50.07 strike-rate
LEFT – 200 players | 7170 innings | 38.70 average | 51.02 strike-rate
Those are fairly drastic differences considering how big the sample size is. Lefties are also getting more innings per individual, meaning they’re hanging around in the team longer. What’s fascinating though is that these numbers drop off a fair bit in the last ten years, which might have something to do with the retirements around that time of legends like Brian Lara, Kumar Sangakkara, Shiv Chanderpaul, Matthew Hayden, Mike Hussey, Graeme Smith, Adam Gilchrist, Saurav Ganguly… hell, it’s a long list that could go on a fair bit longer (Strauss, Langer, Gayle, Trescothick, Fleming…).
Coz when you think about it, who are the best batsmen in the world right now? Easy answer to that one. Filter the top batting averages over the last three years, minimum of fifteen matches played, and you’re looking at a list that reads: Smith, Kohli, Williamson, Taylor, Pujara, Warner, Khawaja, Root, Ali & Chandimal. Kinda surprised to see Usman Khawaja on that list but whatever, fair play to him, he’s one of only two lefties, alongside his compatriot Warner, in the top ten.
That got me thinking… so here are the breakdowns for lefties (batting in the top seven) over the decades…
1950s – 37 players | 658 inns | 34.77 ave | 41 100s
1960s – 44 players | 1003 inns | 38.54 ave | 75 100s
1970s – 55 players | 999 inns | 37.49 ave | 70 100s
1980s – 54 players | 1374 inns | 37.89 ave | 106 100s
1990s – 76 players | 2315 inns | 36.97 ave | 147 100s
2000s – 122 players | 3976 inns | 41.05 ave | 51.05 strike-rate | 367 100s
2010s – 119 players | 3194 inns | 35.85 ave | 50.99 strike-rate | 236 100s
Note that strike-rates weren’t always recorded back in the day and that batting averages, on the whole, have increased through the years with deeper pools of talent to pick from resulting in deeper batting orders. Also with more Test teams being introduced, there are more players fullstop. But even still, that drop off in average between the 2000s and the current decade is enormous. Lefties are averaging less now as a collective than any decade since the 1950s, that’s insane.
Looking back it feels safe to say that the early 2000s were a golden age for left-handed batsmen, the culmination of that whole left-handed mystique going mainstream. Yet in recent times the game has swung back the other way (shout out to bowlers who can swing it both ways). Certainly in New Zealand there is no shortage of lefties in the Test team. Jeet Raval, Tom Latham, Hank Nicholls, Mitchell Santner and Neil Wagner are all likely to make a full straight XI, making for a leftie overload. But who’s scoring all the runs? Kane Williamson and Ross Taylor. Raval, Latham and Nicholls are all top five dudes with an average under 40. Santner’s an all-rounder scoring at 25s and Wagner’s a lower order fella.
But Neil Wagner (and his right-handed batting, left-handed bowling mate Trent Boult) might actually be the reason for this downward trend. A downward trend which is the subject of part rua of this lil investigation… time for the breakdown of left-handed bowlers over the decades…
1950s – 44 players | 87,059 balls | 28.55 ave | 2.03 eco | 84.1 strike-rate
1960s – 50 players | 90,565 balls | 31.30 ave | 2.23 eco | 83.9 strike-rate
1970s – 50 players | 105,201 balls | 32.85 ave | 2.33 eco | 84.5 strike-rate
1980s – 45 players | 16,089.3 overs | 35.02 ave | 2.48 eco | 84.6 strike-rate
1990s – 72 players | 19,454.0 overs | 33.27 ave | 2.62 eco | 76.0 strike-rate
2000s – 92 players | 33,858.3 overs | 36.19 ave | 2.97 eco | 72.9 strike-rate
2010s – 86 players | 30,995.1 overs | 31.93 ave | 2.99 eco | 63.9 strike-rate
A couple things to bear in mind, one is that economy rates in general have been rising ever since one-day cricket was invented and have spiked even more with the popularity of T20 cricket. Another is that the unanimity of six-ball overs is actually a much more recent thing than you’d think. It used to be that you’d play however many balls per over was the rule in the domestic stuff of the host nation and between 1936 and 1979 in Australia that meant eight ball overs. New Zealand and Pakistan had similar regulations in the 1970s. That’s why the stats switch between balls and overs. Plus the leftie bias of old is in effect in the first few lines and there’s also confusion because not every left-armer was recorded, so there might be a few obscure dudes who are listed as default righties.
Also of note: averages may be the main stat for bowling success but averages = runs per wicket so lower economy rates, as was the case back in the day, meant lower averages too. So strike-rates (average deliveries between wickets) are maybe a better indication of all this and those have been coming down rapidly ever since… well, ever since Wasim Akram, pretty much.
But think about the T20 revolution for a sec and now look at the leftie averages dropping by more than four runs in the last eight and a half years. For the first time ever their economy rate has steadied to a plateau. This is concurrent to hit and giggle cricket, to the IPL and the Big Bash… and left-armers are getting wickets nine balls more regularly than they did in the 2000s (when left-handed batsmen were at their peak). There is a myriad of cause and effect in all these grand conclusions but that doesn’t seem like a complete coincidence.
Not sure this will count as anything you can reference in a uni paper (let me know if you do), but this is my theory: left-handed cricketers in general were a rare presence in the early days of the sport, due to socialised and statistical reasons, which meant that their rarity gave them an advantage against bowlers wat more used to bowling to right-handers, allowing lefties to rise up the ranks and become over-represented in Test cricket. This eventually led to a generation of incredible left-handers picking off runs and records for fun. But the same thing has happened coming back the other way now. Left-handed batsmen dominated right-handed bowlers because those righties never got enough experience bowling to lefties and now that lefties are more represented in batting orders, we’re seeing a generation of left-handed bowlers come to the fore and they’re skinning their left-handed batsmen brothers who also haven’t had as much experience against leftie bowlers.
There’s a sub-article to be written about spinners one day; there’s even an argument that spinners should be excluded from this reasoning because those buggers usually only bowl around the wicket anyway. But, to be fair, the top wicket-taker of the last five years was Rangana Herath until Ravi Ashwin overtook him in this current ENG vs IND series (and Jimmy Anderson’ll get him next Test).
What’s crazy is that at the dawn of the 1980s, when Lance Gibbs was the top wicket taker on the planet with 309, seven of the 29 bowlers with 150+ wickets were lefties but only one was a pace bowler (Alan Davidson – though Bill Johnston and Garry Sobers bowled a mix of pace and spin). Genuine left-arm seamers taking buckets of wickets… bit of a myth in those days.
It’s still the case that Herath is the only left-hander in the top 13 wicket-takers in Test matches and there are only five in the top 26. Give it ten years and that’ll change. All five of the top six lefties on the career wickets list retired in the last decade or are still playing so technically it’s already changing (Herath, Wasim, Vettori, Vaas, Johnson & Zhan). Full credit to the wizard that is Dan Vettori getting on there, when he debuted for the Blackcaps as a teenager the top left-handed wicket-taker for NZ was Dick Collinge with 116 and he’d retired twenty years earlier.
All the wicket stats are skewed towards those pesky Aussies, Indians and Englishmen because they play more games than anyone else so since strike-rates were so enlightening last time, let’s do them again. Best strike-rates over the last five years of Test cricket with a minimum of 50 wickets taken. You’ve got eight lefties in the top 24, that’s a full third of them. We’re finally up in the same ratios as the batsmen have been laying down for thirty years.
I reckon that this’ll continue to grow over the next few years. The only team that’s really letting everyone down is England whose seam attack has revolved around Anderson and Broad for so long that only Zimbabwe has had fewer overs bowled by left-handers in the last five years (excluding Ireland and Afghanistan, obvs). Ah but who leads the way? New Zealand and Pakistan. Home of Trent Boult, Mohammed Amir, Neil Wagner, Rahat Ali, Mitch Santner and Wahab Riaz. Amongst others. Here’s the list, which makes for curious reading…
Only drama there is that Pakistan’s lefties have sucked. Probably because they’re mostly all seamers bowling on predominantly spinning conditions but yeah, that average, mate. In this time frame there have been 15 ten-wicket hauls by lefties and six have come from New Zealanders, double any other nation. No surprises that Aussie’s pacers do the quickest damage but Indian lefties have the best average with a way slower strike-rate – that’s what happens when you hold up an end for Ravi Ashwin. All enlightening stuff.
I could go on into the early hours drawing conclusions here but bugger it, you’ve read enough. Left-handed bowlers are ruining life for left-handed batsmen. Case closed.