ICC Team ranking: ICC men’s cricket team rankings in T20I, ODI and Test formats

MRF Tires Think of the ICC rankings as a system of identifying players who can be selected for the ICC World XI today. Take a look at the latest top ten, and you will find that most of the players at the top would be candidates for your current World XI. Rankings have often been described as a measure of form, but this is a simplification. Form rankings will only look at what a player has done over (say) the last year, whereas our rankings take into account a player’s entire career – although they put more emphasis on what he has done recently. What have you done?

We use ‘rankings’ to refer to players’ positions in the tables, and ‘ratings’ to refer to their points.

To be included in the list, players must appear in a match within the qualifying period (usually 12–15 months for Tests, 9–12 months for T20 and ODIs). For example, Parthiv Patel lost his place in the Indian Test team in 2008 and disappeared from the list in 2009. But he maintained a rating which gradually declined as he missed matches. He was then selected again in 2016 and returned to the ranking. If a player confirms his retirement he is also removed from the list. For example, MS Dhoni retired from Tests in 2014 and was dropped from the Test rankings – but he remains in the ODI tables. Players get ranked as soon as they complete the match. However, we only publish the top 100 players (maximum), so it may take several matches for a player to be included.

In March 2021, we moved to a weekly system of updating player rankings. Under this system, the rankings for women’s players for both ODIs and T20Is are updated every Tuesday, while the rankings for men across all three formats – Test, ODI and T20Is – are updated on Wednesdays. These updates include all matches completed up to the previous day and do not include any matches played on the day of the update. Team rankings will continue to be updated as before – after each Test series and after each ODI and T20I.

If a batsman does not bat, his rating remains unchanged. We don’t want ratings to penalize a player when he has done nothing wrong (and that would be difficult if, for example, an innings was lost due to rain and the entire team lost points). The situation is a little different with bowlers. If the opponent is bowled out for less than 150, the bowler who did not bowl is not penalized (obviously the conditions were favorable to other bowlers, and his services were not required). But if the opposition team scores a big score, the bowlers who did not bowl in the innings lose points.

Rating scores have the same meaning as traditional averages. More than 900 marks is a supreme achievement. Very few players are able to reach there and even fewer players are able to stay there for long. A score of over 750 is usually enough to place a player in the world top ten. 500 plus is a good, solid rating.

The challenge is to find a fair way of rating a keeper. You can’t rate him just on the basis of catches and stumpings, as it largely depends on the chances created by the bowler (e.g. how many chances did Warne create for Healy?) Historically there has been no accuracy on missed chances. Details are not kept, and in any case, what is the missed opportunity? Therefore, as with other fielding skills, we will not attempt to give a rating as we are not sure it will be reliable.

We have created an all-rounder index that gives a good indication of who the best all-rounders in the world are in Test and ODI cricket. To get the index, simply take the player’s batting and bowling points, multiply them together and divide by 1000. So a player with 800 batting and 0 bowling gets an index of zero (because he cannot bowl and hence is not an all-rounder!), 600 batting/200 bowling gets an index of zero.