Cricket World Ratings 26/7/2016

There are three interesting series taking place at the moment.  Most interesting, perhaps, is England's attempt to exploit home advantage and take revenge on Pakistan, who defeated them last winter.  England and Pakistan are clearly two of the world's top five teams right now.  Indeed, after Pakistan won the first test, and England the second, the two have converged on exactly the same ranking.  Both teams have only a few form batsmen: England won the second test after their two stars, Cook and Root, came good, the latter with a double hundred.  England have the better seam attack, but Pakistan's Yasir Shah is clearly the best spinner (indeed, after he took 10 wickets in the first test, he displaced England's Anderson as the world's highest ranked bowler). With two tests still to come, there's still a lot to play for, although right now England look favourites.

The other battles are less interesting.  Australia start their visit to Sri Lanka with a ranking 187 points higher than their hosts; India have a ranking 205 points better than the West Indies.  In each case, the weaker team is at home, but these are big margins.  The nice thing about an Elo-style rating system is that these margins actually mean something, and what a difference of 205 means is an expected value of 0.805 for India per game - or in effect, a prediction of a 4-1 victory in a 5 game series.  India have duly won the first test by a big margin, with Virat Kohli scoring (like Root for England) a double hundred, and wickets for Ravichandran Ashwin (who has therbey successed Yasir at the top of the bowling rankings after only one match).  The series prediction looks pretty good right right now: the home side (who won the T20 world cup this winter) are surely capable of winning a test, but a West Indian victory in the series would be remarkable (and might have been thought of as such even before this disastrous start).

Australia begin against Sri Lanka today; the inexperienced Sri Lankans, recently defeated by England, may also find home advantage inadequate.

So here are the latest rankings.  England have gained more from beating Pakistan than India have gained from their well-expected victory. But the next few weeks could see quite a lot of movement as all three series progress.

Australia     166    
India         123  +7 
England        91 +19 
Pakistan       91 -19  
South Africa   76    
New Zealand    43    
Sri Lanka     -21   
West Indies   -82  -7   
Bangladesh   -172    
Zimbabwe     -315