Expert Blog

Revisiting team ranking schemes

What must be the criteria to accurately define a team’s standing in world cricket? Our expert looks at existing schemes and analyses them

I know of a lot of team ranking schemes in cricket: some are mighty complicated, and many are duds.

It’s quite a puzzle actually. A lot of people can recognize a good team performance in cricket, but few seem able to encapsulate it in an appropriate mathematical model.

Let’s look at ODI cricket, and let’s list some of the popularly touted criteria, in no particular order:


1. If you win more matches, your ranking should be higher

2. If you defeat stronger teams, you must get more weight

3. If you win ‘away’ matches, you must get more weight

4. Recent wins must get more weight, and this weight must steadily decline over time

5. Winning by bigger margins must fetch more credit

6. Winning a series or tournament must fetch extra credit

7. Winning when your top players are injured must receive more recognition.


About half of the existing ranking schemes only consider criterion 1. They give one point for a win, 0.5 for a draw or tie, and 0 points for a loss. Then they choose a time window (typically a calendar year or a moving 12-month window) and start calculating!

It’s easy to pick holes with this scheme: play 20 matches with the weakest available team and win all of them! So if Bangladesh plays 20 ODIs against Zimbabwe and wins all of them, Bangladesh could become the ‘best’ team in the world.

This isn’t making much sense. In fact, it’s pretty clear that a ‘good’ ranking scheme must use as many of the above criteria as possible.

How many of these criteria are feasible? Most would say criterion 7 is subjective. They might also argue that criterion 5 is a little hard to model.

Let’s therefore look at ICC’s ODI ranking scheme (that we’ve written about earlier). It considers criteria 1, 2 and 4. In particular, the ICC scheme models criteria 2 and 4 rather elegantly. I won’t go into details, but criterion 2 is handled really neatly. My only grouse with criterion 4 is the choice of August 1 as the cut-off date to reduce weights: this makes a win on August 2 relatively more valuable than a win on July 29.

The ICC scheme can, in an awkward sort of way, accommodate criterion 6 (the ICC Test cricket ranking scheme does consider criterion 6; the awkwardness in the ODI ranking scheme is because of tournaments involving several teams). It also seems feasible to bring in criterion 5 via the Duckworth-Lewis method, because D/L can quantify every ODI win in terms of a run margin.

The inability to accommodate criterion 3 is a serious weakness although it can be argued that the ‘home-away’ variation is less pronounced in a 50-over match, especially with pitches everywhere now being prepared to favour batsmen.

The ODI ranking scheme published on rediff.com for 8 years is of comparable pedigree: it accommodates criteria 1, 2, 3 and 6, but fails to consider criterion 4, although there is a reasonably easy way to do it.

There is, of course, a completely different way to look at team rankings: suitably add up the individual rankings of the players making up the team! This is the Castrol way, and it was very encouraging to note that the Castrol Index correctly spotted the semi-finalists in the recently concluded Champions League.