100+ Runs Partnerships in Cricket and their impact

Cricket is a team game to the core. Most matches are decided based on how a team performs as a cohesive unit with each team member playing a crucial role. One of the aspects of international cricket is execution of 100 runs plus partnerships between batsmen.

Partnerships are the cornerstones of building a successful team total or for chasing the opponent’s total whether it be One Day cricket, Test Match Cricket or T20 Cricket.

Over the years, partnerships have proven to be the deciding factor between winning and loosing. Be it building an innings, stabilizing a tottering position or putting the team in a comfortable position, partnerships have played a crucial role.

A dominating partner can always take the pressure off a less effective batsman on a given day, at the same time ensuring that the team score does not suffer. Apart from this, big partnerships can dent the confidence of the opposition and grind them into submission, giving the batting team an immense psychological advantage.

In this article we discuss how this aspect has come to impact the game and the results. (data analysed as on 2nd April, 2023 since the beginning of international cricket in the 19th century)

We can clearly see from the above table that the majority of 100+ partnerships have been made for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd wickets, being almost 57% of the total number of partnerships, indicating that top order batsmen play well together.

We now analyse how players from various teams have executed 100+ partnerships. The following table demonstrates how various test playing teams have executed 100+ partnerships across formats:

As above, England leads the table with most 100 plus partnerships, whereas, across formats India has most 100+ partnerships in ODI cricket and T20I cricket and England has most 100 plus partnerships in Test matches.

Interestingly, West Indies, which was probably one of the most dominating teams in the 70s and 80s, particularly in test matches, has less than 1000 partnerships, suggesting that the team thrived on individual brilliance and several players were turned the tide of the games on their own.

Also, we find that 4610 partnerships have resulted in a win out of 8279 and 1924 partnerships have resulted in a tie/draw. So the overall effectiveness of such partnerships is stable and not stunning as demonstrated by the below table:-

As per the above table, batsmen from Australia have forged the most match winning partnerships whereas if we talk about format specific partnerships, India have forged most match winning partnerships in ODIs and T20Is and Australia in Test matches.

In the next part of this article we will discuss the players and 100+ partnerships.