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The final ranking
Updates: |
December 5, 2001
New Zealand leap ahead in Rediff ratingsM J Manohar Rao and Srinivas BhogleBy sharing a series against Australia in Australia, New Zealand have climbed to the fifth position in the Rediff test cricket ratings. Australia, however, continue to be comfortably placed at the first position, being more than 10 points ahead of South Africa. England continue to be third, and Pakistan hold on to the fourth position, but Sri Lanka (6) and India (7) have both been pushed down by one place because of New Zealand's sterling performance Down Under. West Indies drop almost 2 points while remaining at the eighth position. Zimbabwe continue to be ninth in the ratings. The ratings must seem unfair to the Sri Lankan supporter. Their 3-0 victory against West Indies fetched them just half an additional point, and actually saw them dropping from the fifth to the sixth place in the relative rankings, albeit by the very smallest whisker. This is because West Indies' "away" performance in recent years has been dismal, while Australia have been impossible to defeat (or even draw against) at home. The "weight" for defeating West Indies when they are playing away is as low as 0.19, while the "weight" for defeating Australia when they play at home was an amazing 0.88. Even a draw against Australia, therefore, has a weight of 0.44! We provide, below, the updated version of Table A as on December 4, 2001. Recall that we are still assuming the third India-South Africa test match to be "unofficial".
The corresponding ranking table, Table F, appears below. The performance index is now multiplied by 100 so that the numbers are more "convenient" to view.
Notice tiny changes in the performance indices of Pakistan and England although they have not been recently involved in test cricket. This is because of the way the Rao-Bhogle index has been defined, with the outcome of every test series having a marginal impact on the index of every other test playing country. Since we are measuring relative team performances, this variation is to be expected. Finally, let's cast a glance at the "official" ICC Test Championship Table where the December 4, 2001 rankings (with points in brackets) are the following: 1. Australia (1.54), 2. South Africa (1.50), 3. England and Sri Lanka (1.14 each), 5. New Zealand (1.00), 6. West Indies (0.93), 7. Pakistan (0.73), 8. India (0.69) and 9. Zimbabwe (0.50). While India are probably not too far away from their "real" position, Pakistan's ranking is a shocker. The West Indies also don't deserve to be up at the sixth position, especially after their 0-3 defeat. But ICC's scheme only looks at the outcome of the series, not individual test matches. In fact Steve Waugh is reportedly unhappy that ICC doesn't distinguish a close 3-2 series from a 5-0 drubbing. Knowing the ICC's ways, this doesn't surprise us at all!
Also read: The Rediff test cricket ratings will soon become "interactive"; cricket
fans will be able to enter different combinations of points for home and away
matches and see how the ratings change. Computer programs for this interactive
service are being developed by Siba Prasad Satapathy and Manoj Kumar Choudhury
of NAL in association with the Rediff team.
Acknowledgements
To obtain all the Test match results we used the data available on cricinfo. We are grateful to Pallavi Bhogle and Dhruv Bhogle whose painstaking efforts in tabulating and cross-checking all the entries of Table A made our subsequent work so much easier. Finally, we thank Rediff and Prem Panicker for agreeing to publish this note.
M J Manohar Rao is professor and director, Department of Economics, University of Mumbai, Mumbai; Srinivas Bhogle is scientist and head, Information Management Division, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore.
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