New Zealand BC Opening Partners

And that is the key to this post, opening partners in first class cricket and beyond.  After posting my Tom Latham post I got to thinking about how effective opening partnerships in international cricket have been of late, and then gone to Plunket Shield to plumb the depths of our opening partnership stocks.

The first thing that caught my is is the fact the two leading teams in the competition lead the averages in opening partnerships, Otago and CD.  And you'd expect the remainder to be close in relation to their current position on the points table and that is largely true, but bucking the trend is 3rd placed ND which in fact tails in averages.

The standout pairing of Rutherford/Redmond have managed to score 4 century opening partnerships, one more than second placed CD.  Wellington has the highest partnership, and Canterbury has the ignominy of having 3 of four scoreless partnerships.

So what is my point?  As alluded to earlier, there is one real shortfall in the BC road to success and that's opening partnerships,  Dare it be mentioned Redmond and Rutherford be drafted in as full time openers?  I know How is on the outer and Raval is a relatively unknown and unproven but6 really something has to be done and a team within a team that is proven would be the logical way to go.

The stats (in order of averages not points table position)

	Opening Partnership stats Plunket Shield 2012/13
Team	Otago	CD	Wellington	Canterbury	Auckland	ND
	186	13	102	6	14	18
	54	3	1	1	15	103
	6	51	59	28	42	51
	1	51	211	77	72	54
	41	7	13	0	53	29
	22	22	50	82	50	5
	3	14	5	4	1	9
	120	22	4	37	71	2
	103	89	6	28	5	28
	16	107	2	0	1	1
	4	11	56	0	49	16
	37	7	6	81	4	63
	10	10	9	131	72	37
	38	173	37	95	0	5
	63	33	78	4	26	4
	111	145	5	19	41	64
			22	1		3
				3
	815	758	666	597	516	492
	16	16	17	18	16	17
	50.94	47.38	39.18	33.17	32.25	28.94