Does India deserve to be the ICC No.1 Test Team ?
| I live in New Delhi, India and was happy this morning when India beat Lanka at Mumbai and climbed to the ICC No.1 ranking amongst teams playing Test Cricket. But somehow I wasn’t convinced that India deserved to be the no.1 Test Team. What made me really doubtful about the quality of the Test Ranking system was when I read at the beginning of the India vs Sri Lanka series that if Lanka won the series, they would become the world’s no.1 Test Team. Surely a team that doesn’t even come close to looking like winning a test in South Africa or Australia should not even come close to that kind of a position. So I did some check on statistics of the world’s leading Test Teams, and the results reconfirmed my doubts.
For my study, I picked up the last 5 years as the point of reference and did a basic research on the overall results of the teams and then filtered the results for the ultimate test – in matches that they have played away from home. Here are the results: The final column indicates the subtracted score of Win% – Loss % to indicate the dominance level of a team. Test Cricket: Leading Team Records from 5 Dec 2004 to 4 Dec 2009 |
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| Matches | Won | Lost | Draw | Win% | Loss% | (Win – Loss) | |
| Australia (overall) | 56 | 35 | 10 | 11 | 62.50 | 17.86 | 44.64 |
| Australia (away) | 28 | 13 | 7 | 8 | 46.43 | 25.00 | 21.43 |
| India (overall) | 53 | 22 | 10 | 21 | 41.51 | 18.87 | 22.64 |
| India (Away) | 29 | 11 | 7 | 11 | 37.93 | 24.14 | 13.79 |
| South Africa (overall) | 52 | 26 | 17 | 9 | 50.00 | 32.69 | 17.31 |
| South Africa (away) | 23 | 10 | 7 | 6 | 43.48 | 30.43 | 13.04 |
| Sri Lanka (overall) | 45 | 23 | 12 | 10 | 51.11 | 26.67 | 24.44 |
| Sri Lanka (away) | 23 | 7 | 10 | 6 | 30.43 | 43.48 | -13.04 |
| England (overall) | 64 | 23 | 19 | 22 | 35.94 | 29.69 | 6.25 |
| England (away) | 29 | 5 | 13 | 11 | 17.24 | 44.83 | -27.59 |
As is obvious from the above table, Australia are still clearly the world’s leading Test Team and though India and South Africa are inching upwards, more work needs to be done before they can genuinely claim to be no.1. As for Sri Lanka, they should have had no business to be a claimant for the top spot.
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Categories: Statistics Tags: ICC Rankings
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