INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the latest addition to my “100 cricketers” series. In this post the focus is on the opening batters from our seventh XI. The introductory post to the series can be found here, and the most recent post in it, in which I introduce the seventh XI, can be found here.

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL OPENING PAIR OF MODERN TIMES

My openers in this XI played as an opening pair for many years. In total they opened the batting together in 148 test match innings, putting on 6.482 runs for an average partnership of 47.31. The partnership who in terms of weight of run scoring stand alone at the top of the all-time openers list are England’s Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe who opened 38 test match innings, with their partnerships tallying 3,249 runs for an average opening stand of 87.81. For another point of comparison, where Greenidge and Haynes shared 16 century opening stands in 148 partnerships, Hobbs and Sutcliffe managed 15 in 38 innings. Hobbs also had an earlier England opening partnership with Wilfred Rhodes which averaged more than 60 runs a time. Cricinfo has an interesting article about successful opening pairs here.

GORDON GREENIDGE

Many years as an overseas player with Hampshire helped Greenidge to become the West Indies all-time leading first-class run scorer, although he did not quite make it 100 first-class hundreds (he finished with 92). In test cricket he scored 7,558 runs at 44.72. In the 1984 series in England which the West Indies won 5-0 he scored two double centuries, 223 at Manchester and 214 not out at Lord’s to take his team to a nine wicket win on the fifth day. He was noted for being particularly dangerous when limping, as then he would only be interested in boundaries. 

DESMOND HAYNES

He also had a long county career, with Middlesex in his case. His test career yielded 7,487 runs at 42.29. He was also very successful in ODIs, tallying 8,648 runs at 41.37 in that form of the game. In test matches he often adopted the anchor role, allowing the flamboyant strokemakers elsewhere in the order to play around him. This opening ppair would, as they often did in their day, set the innings up well for the middle order, and we will be seeing nos 3,4 and 5 in the next post in this series.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Author: Thomas

I am a founder member and currently secretary of the West Norfolk Autism Group and am autistic myself. I am a very keen photographer and almost every blog post I produce will feature some of my own photographs. I am an avidly keen cricket fan and often post about that sport. View all posts by Thomas