England are generally considered a stronger team than either West Indies or Pakistan. Moreover, home advantage is a big thing in test match cricket. So that leads to an interesting question. What level of performance, in England's two home series this summer, would England have needed to deliver to justify their a priori assumption of superiority? Well, that depends on just how superior you had considered them to be. My cricket world ratings, working on the Elo principle, make probabilistic predications for each match based on the teams' previous rankings; then adjust the rankings in proportion to the extent that the observed result was considered unlikely. The predications also take who is playing at home into account. And, broadly speaking, to retain their ranking over the course of the summer, England needed to win four out of six tests, while losing only one. They came quite close, but bad weather washed out much of the last two tests of the summer. And with 2-1 and 1-0 wins from their two series, England's end of summer ranking is actually down, in spite of a pair of series victories.
My current world rankings look like this:
- Australia 220
- India 212
- New Zealand 175
- England 161 -11
- Pakistan 96 +11
- Sri Lanka 84
- South Africa 59
- West Indies 9
- Bangladesh -122
- Zimbabwe -251
- Afghanistan -303
- Ireland -339
And England finish still someway clear of Pakistan, but rather less close than they started out after two successive draws.
Meanwhile, the latest ICC ratings look like this:
Australia 116
New Zealand 115
India 110
England 106 +2
Sri Lanka 91
South Africa 90
Pakistan 86 -1
West Indies 82
Bangladesh 55
Zimbabwe 18
The official ratings are somewhat Elo-like, but give special credit for winning series, and this is England's first series victory over Pakistan since 2010 (you may remember that at the end of 2016, England had beaten every country more recently than they'd lost to them except for Pakistan).
Next up: if COVID-19 allows, Afghanistan will get to take on Australia in a real battle of minnows v giants, but not until November.
