THE value of having one left-handed batsman and one right-hander at the crease has been regularly promoted by cricket commentators every summer.

The argument goes it’s better to have one of each because it prevents the bowler from settling into any sort of rhythm because he continually has to keep changing his line.

In theory, the bowler will produce more run-scoring opportunities for the batsmen through inaccurate bowling.

There’s also been suggestions the potential ball-by-ball change in field settings can tire out the opposition.

But there’s no doubt it was one of those cricket theories that was based more on perception than hard data.

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Enter cricket blogger Kartikeya Date.

Writing for Cricinfo, Date looked to discover exactly how successful left- and right-handed batting pairs have been in one-day cricket and whether they have an advantage on left-left or right-right pairs.

What Date found was, if not surprising, certainly food for thought for cricket lovers ahead of the upcoming World Cup.

Date trawled through every one-day game featuring Test-playing nations since 1979.

He focused on the top seven batting positions only.

He found individually there hasn’t been any significant difference in the performance of left-handed and right-handed batsmen.

Lefties had the upper hand during the late 1990s when batsmen like Brian Lara, Sourav Ganguly, Michael Bevan and Sanath Jayasuriya were at the top of their game, but right-handers have been better in recent years as players like AB de Villiers, Virat Kohli and Steve Smith rule world cricket.

Overall there’s been very little difference in the performance of left-right, right-right and left-left pairs.

Since 2000, the average partnerships for each were 36.3 runs (left-right), 35.3 runs (right-right) and 34.4 runs (left-left).

Australia’s bowlers actually performed much better against left-right pairs, holding them to an average of 30.1 runs per partnership, compared to 34.5 for left-left pairs and 39.3 for right-right pairs.

Despite these results, Date found left-right batting pairs have become increasingly common.

In 1989, more than 75 per cent of batting pairs featured two right-handed batsmen. That dropped to around 40 per cent last year, as left-right pairs increased to more than 50 per cent.

“The record does not suggest that there is any advantage to sending a left-hander in to join a right-hander (or vice versa), compared to sending a right-hander in to join a right-hander, or a left-hander to join a left-hander,” Date wrote.

“Further, it shows that bowlers should be used to bowling against left-right pairs since such pairs are as common as right-hand pairs in contemporary international cricket.”

You can read Date’s full article, which includes graphs, here.