Test Cricket World Ratings 9/2/2016

So, after the long introduction, here are the current cricket world ratings, according to my Elo-based system:

Australia      142       

India          116        

Pakistan       93          

South Africa   76          

England        71          

New Zealand    67          

Sri Lanka      -4           

West Indies   -75         

Bangladesh   -172      

Zimbabwe     -315

So there’s a familiar theme already: Australia are the best team in the world.  But the next thing to note is that 6^th placed New Zealand are within 100 points of Australia; as we saw in the last post, in 2007, not a single team was rated within 200 points of Australia.  Where we have big margins is at the bottom: Bangladesh are weak, and Zimbabwe even more so.

An interesting thing is the story of South Africa’s decline.  South Africa begun 2015 in first place and a rating of 188, and as recently as mid-November last year, South Africa were leading the rankings:

South Africa   132        

Australia      130        

Pakistan        93          

India           78          

England         54          

New Zealand     48          

Sri Lanka       27          

West Indies    -74         

Bangladesh    -172      

Zimbabwe      -315

But poor results against India and England have seen them fall back.
 

One other thing we might want to do is compare our ratings to the official ICC ratings, which we can find here, and which are summarised below:

India         110

Australia     109

South Africa  109

Pakistan      102

England       102

New Zealand    99

Sri Lanka      89

West Indies    76

Bangladesh     47

Zimbabwe        5

The numerical values from the two systems are not strictly comparable, but  there’s a similar story overall.  The ICC ratings have an absolute floor of zero, which Zimbabwe barely exceed; while the top teams all have almost identical scores. The most striking difference is the ICC put India on top, whereas our ratings favour Australia. The obvious question is which system has produced the right result? In fact, there’s no real way of answering this question, as if we knew which team was best as a fact, we wouldn’t need a rating system to tell us. But we can try to understand where the differences come from. To do this, we’re going to have to look at the ICC system in more detail. First up, however, we're going to compare the output of the two systems over the longer term.