Sehwag and Gambhir most feared opening pair !

[amit467]

These 2 will become the most feared opening partnership in world cricket. Both are very positive and score at great nick. They will batter opponents as a pair in to submission. If they bat for most of a day they will score at electric pace and chalk up massive partnerships with ball going all over the shop. They will win a lot of games for India. Shewag finally found a patner who will keep it ticking along and at times will dominate ooponents as well! These 2 will soon earn reputation as most feared opening pair in world cricket!

Completely Agree:two_thumbs_up::two_thumbs_up::two_thumbs_up:

[TaNk]

Gambir & Sehwag world's #1 opening pair

[manoj_admlab]

^ yes they are

[Shane]

Im not much into Hindu Mythology, but yeh toh Ram-Laxman (not VVS) ki jodi hai !!!

[Predator_05]

Their partnership yesterday was great fun to watch. They were pinching singles and doubles AT WILL. So much for Ricky Ponting's claim that India play old school cricket. Ravi Shastri said on air that he might want to consider eating those words, and i'm inclined to agree. The only team that has looked old school out there was Australia. The Indians are playing hard hitting, fast scoring, stump wrecking cricket.

[Shane]

Their partnership yesterday was great fun to watch. They were pinching singles and doubles AT WILL. So much for Ricky Ponting's claim that India play old school cricket. Ravi Shastri said on air that he might want to consider eating those words, and i'm inclined to agree. The only team that has looked old school out there was Australia. The Indians are playing hard hitting, fast scoring, stump wrecking cricket.

Rav said it twice on air and quite sternly,however i fail to fathom the basis of Punter's statement in the first place

[King Tendulkar]

Like I predicted these two are going to strike fear in oppos for years. My faith in Gambhir and championing him for near 2 years has been wholly vindicated, he just needed the run like I always said. Gambhir has proved me right he is the man:-D

[Sachinism]

Their partnership yesterday was great fun to watch. They were pinching singles and doubles AT WILL. So much for Ricky Ponting's claim that India play old school cricket. Ravi Shastri said on air that he might want to consider eating those words, and i'm inclined to agree. The only team that has looked old school out there was Australia. The Indians are playing hard hitting, fast scoring, stump wrecking cricket.

Yeh that was one of the best things to see, the way they kept pinching singles. Haven't seen many do that to Aus in a while

[Fontaine]

The thing about Gambhir is that he's such a great player of spin. If he negotiates the new ball and hangs around to make 40+ then there's still no respite for the bowling team when they bring on the spinners. Really, the only person that can get him out at the moment is himself.

[Lord]

The thing about Gambhir is that he's such a great player of spin. If he negotiates the new ball and hangs around to make 40+ then there's still no respite for the bowling team when they bring on the spinners. Really, the only person that can get him out at the moment is himself.

the earlier he stops himself from getting out the better. btw many people says he india's best player of spin he's certainly a gr8 player of spin,but IMO he isnt best. the best is sehwag. just my opinion

[Predator_05]

http://www.bcci.tv/the-talking-point1gambhir.html Since his first opening assignment in a Test, at Lord’s in 2002, Virender Sehwag has had no fewer than eight partners, putting him on course to match England's Geoff Boycott who saw off 17 associates in twice as many matches. Today, as Viru celebrated his thirtieth birthday, he may well have come to the conclusion that Gautam Gambhir (pictured above), and not Wasim Jaffer, will be remembered as the most reliable. The roll-call, in order, reads: Jaffer, Sanjay Bangar, Aakash Chopra, Parthiv Patel, Yuvraj Singh, Gambhir, Rahul Dravid, Jaffer again, Irfan Pathan and now Gambhir. That no other batsman in Test annals has posted 200-plus opening stands with four partners – Bangar, Dravid, Gambhir and Jaffer – says something flattering about the depth of Indian talent at the top of the order. One suspects, however, that it says rather more about the selectors’ fondness for chopping and changing. Gambhir, who turned 27 last Tuesday, and Sehwag initially joined forces in Mumbai in 2004, putting on eleven and five against Australia, then flagged up their potential in India’s next Test, stacking up 218 against South Africa in Kanpur. In their first 16 innings as a team-within-a-team, reaching 75 eight times but failed to reach 20 just as often. Come the next series, against Pakistan, Gambhir, somewhat hastily, had been displaced by Jaffer. Not until last December was Gambhir recalled to the Test XI, and by then Sehwag was in the wilderness, desperately seeking his lost mojo. Gambhir made five and three against Pakistan and was promptly dropped, but his ebullient one-day form against Australia suggested his time could come again. Finally, in Sri Lanka this July, the two Librans were reunited. Their alliances – 36, 25, 167, 90, 51 and 62 – proved just about the only saving grace of the tour for India’s spun-dried batsmen. They have built on that in this series, putting on 70 in the first innings both in Bangalore and Mohali, but it was the adaptability of their liaison on Sunday afternoon and this morning that marked it out as their most significant to date. Sehwag and Gambhir are both partial to progressing in boundaries, the former primarily with force of muscle and personality, the latter with exquisite timing and left-handed elegance, but the fields set by Ricky Ponting today narrowed their normal avenues. Yet instead of being drawn into rashness, which would have been fairly excusable given the state of the game, they did something on occasions levelled as being very un-Indian: they started running. Quick singles and sharp twos were the order of the morning as they added 82 at five an over, hitting just four fours plus Gambhir’s delightful on-driven six off Cameron White. His second Test hundred had been a long time coming – 14 matches to be exact – and he will have cursed himself for not reaching it in the first innings, but it was eminently worth the wait, not to say richly deserved. In all, the pair’s third century partnership was worth 182 at more than four and a half runs an over, not so much rubbing as burying Australian noses in the dirt. Time will tell, but Sehwag may at last have found his dance partner.

[fineleg]

The thing about Gambhir is that he's such a great player of spin. If he negotiates the new ball and hangs around to make 40+ then there's still no respite for the bowling team when they bring on the spinners. Really, the only person that can get him out at the moment is himself.

GG needs to conquer Ajanta before he can get that title of great against spin. Right now, he is one of the best we got, but Mendis needs to be taken to cleaners in a Test series sometime.

[PaiN_KiLLeR]

I first saw Gambhir in ODI in Dhaka (was it 2004?) where he began his innings with a flurry of boundaries and later just fizzled out once he went past 50. He was too inconsistent and got dropped from the national side, but he kept making comebacks because of some heavy scoring in domestic cricket. After watching him fail repeatedly in important games I wondered whether he belonged to the Brijesh Patel category of cricketers (Masters of the domestic circuit but pappus in intl cricket). The CB series in Australia was the turning point in his international career and he hasn't looked back since then. He is now an indispensable part of this Indian team. A true late bloomer, GG.

[Kohum]

I remember seeing once incident in this match, where Sehwag cut the ball to the gully region. Siddle was fielding there. He fielded the ball and took two steps before releasing the ball. Gautam was ambling in and after touching the crease, he looked back to see VS speeding to come back for second. Without hesitation, Gautam sped back. That's camaraderie !! Still remembered the ad of WILLS, the india team sponsors at that time, that had their ads of cricket album built around this word [one of them was hubby & wifey changing flat tire]. Most feared or not, I donot know that. But their camaraderie is a pleazure to watch ! There was also once incident in SL, where Gautam was on 49 and had a few anxious moments. Sehwag rushed down had a few words and When Gautam hit the next ball for 4 [ I think], Sehwag was the first one to run down & hug GG. Good Friendship!!

[manoj_admlab]

How good is the Sehwag-Gambhir pair? S Rajesh October 24, 2008 http://content-ind.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/current/story/375112.html India's current openers have performed exceptionally at the top of the order, producing numbers that suggest India may have found a long-term combination In a land blessed with outstanding middle-order batsmen, quality openers have been unusually hard to find, but in Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir, India might have finally found a long-term solution. Since they came together for the series in Sri Lanka earlier this year, the two have been in sparkling form and more often than not have given the team an excellent platform to build on. In ten innings during this period, they've been consistency personified: seven times they have added more than 50, and in their three other innings, only once were they separated before 25. Admittedly all these stands have come in matches played in the subcontinent, but the manner in which the two have gone about their jobs suggests they should be able to handle tougher assignments too. The opening pair's performances have been among the standout features of the two Tests against Australia so far. The visitors have been outclassed in most departments, but perhaps most convincingly in the opening acts with both bat and ball. Gambhir and Sehwag have strung together partnerships of 70, 16, 70 and 182. Compare that with Australia's opening stands - 0, 21, 0, 49 - and it's clear that India have had the early advantage. Just how well does this opening pair compare with the best that India has produced? As the table below indicates, their numbers are better than anyone else's. Admittedly, they've played less than half as many games as Sunil Gavaskar and Chetan Chauhan did, and they haven't yet been tested on bouncier pitches, but so far their stats are spectacular - they are already the second-most prolific Indian opening pair. (Click here for the entire partnership list.) In fact, their numbers are amazing even if you expand the comparison to all opening pairs around the world. Among pairs who have put together at least 1500 runs, Gambhir and Sehwag's average has been bettered only by the legendary pair of Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe, who averaged nearly 88, with 25 stands of 50-plus in 38 innings. The one thing the Indian pair can learn from Hobbs and Sutcliffe is to convert starts into significant stands: out of 15 stands of over 50 in 29 innings, Gambhir and Sehwag have only converted four into century partnerships; the conversion percentage is much lower than that for England's pair. With Gambhir and Sehwag, though, the story isn't just the number of runs they score; it's the rate they score them at. Both are attacking batsmen capable of piercing the field on both sides of the wicket and going over the top, but they are also equally adept at tapping the ball into the gaps or short of fielders and running the quick singles. The ability to do all this well was evident in their most recent partnership, when they smashed 182 runs in a mere 39.1 overs. Overall, Gambhir and Sehwag have scored their runs at more than four-and-a-half an over, making them easily the fastest-scoring pair. (This is only among pairs whom Cricinfo has recorded as having faced at least 1500 deliveries. The balls-faced data wasn't available regularly for matches played more than 15 years ago; hence the data for some pairs isn't complete.) Wasim Jaffer isn't the most quick-scoring batsman around, but when he has opened with Sehwag the runs have come pretty quickly too, at a rate of 4.07 per over. The one difference between Sehwag's partnerships with Gambhir and Jaffer - apart from the fact that the average runs per dismissal is much lower with Jaffer - is the manner in which the pairs score their runs. When Sehwag bats with Gambhir, the emphasis is much more on rotating the strike and getting the singles, which account for 25% of the total runs scored off the bat by them - of the 1652 bat runs scored by them, 413 are singles. With Jaffer, though, that percentage drops to 19.34 (182 singles out of 941 bat runs), which indicates that the strike isn't rotated as regularly. The story so far for Gambhir and Sehwag has been terrific, but they'll be the first ones to admit that they have tougher challenges to conquer before they are mentioned among the top pairs ever in Test cricket. Other pairs - Dinesh Karthik and Jaffer, SS Das and Sadagoppan Ramesh - have flourished briefly before floundering, and a final verdict on Gambhir and Sehwag must wait till they pass stiffer ordeals in seamer-friendly conditions outside the subcontinent. The tour to New Zealand early next year should be good test, but the manner in which they've performed so far suggests India may at last have found a long-term answer to a vexing problem. S Rajesh is stats editor of Cricinfo

[Sachinism]

^^ Great going for the two Strikerate is awesome, better than Hayden Langer Averaging less than only Hobbs and Sutcliffe

[amits]

sehwag-gambhir is the best ever opening combo in test cricket. no other opening combination consistently gives starts of 50/0 in 10 overs in tests & kills the opposition so badly

[bharat297]

they are doing well but they need to be doing this for 2-3 years consistently before they can start to be compared to say Langer & Hayden.

[PaiN_KiLLeR]

Surprising to find no mention of Greenidge-Haynes in the list of best ever test openers.

[King Tendulkar]

Surprising to find no mention of Greenidge-Haynes in the list of best ever test openers.

Totally agree. Is it not a mistke them not being there