Mike Hussey moves to the world no1 spot in test batting rankings, without playing a match ! is that fair ?

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I wrote a piece in my blog (get a plug in) just a couple of days ago about the team rankings and how complicated they are. Well they're nothing compared to the player rankings however they need to be.

* You can't have rankings that never go down because record levels will always being set.
Example
KP scores 50 & 100 rating up to 900
KP scores 0 & 10 rating stays at 900
KP scores 100 & 80 rating goes up to 950

* The Sangakarra situation could have come about because the rankings are on a two year cycle so the 185 and 79 against Pakistan in March '06 drops off and is replaced by 50, 21, 10 and 14 against West Indies.

*The rankings obviously have some anomalies (Harbhajan Singh is higher than Owais Shah etc) but they're based on recent form if you want to see how good a player is then their career averages show you all you need. The rankings show a snapshot of who's the best batsman at this moment in time.

*With regard Monti's comments about the career values you need to realise they are the peak values, so SRT who's never scored 250 suffers plus his best run of form 241* 60* 194* came after terribly form where his rating would have gone thru the floor. Lara's 400 come on a dead pitch and his 375 came too early in his career when his rating was low.

AD Nourse got so high because he played one of the greatest innings ever, batting with a broken left thumb he scored a match-winning double century in nine plus hours. He also ended with a 50+ average playing against Australia and England alone, not bad for a player who lost his best years to WW2....Show more

If that’s an all time ranking, I am not a bit surprised. India began doing well only since 2000s, to be honest. Earlier, their main motive was to draw the matches and series. Edit: The West Indies team after 1990 has let them down; else they should have been up there after Australia. Everything’s fair. Bangladesh is not a test team at all. BCCI is the culprit here. Ireland would have improved more had they been given the test status. Zimbabwe was a far much better team than Bangladesh with players like Flower brothers, Streak, Guy Whittal and others. They were competitive at least. Robert Mugabe is the culprit there. Several white players were on top of their careers when Mugabe started all that sh!t. Edit: Where did I say only modern era matters, Mr. Over? I said India started doing well only after 2000 and were not a good test team before that. You're seriously over aged to participate in any kind of discussion, Mr. Over....Show more

The old PriceWaterHouseCoopers rankings were always considered innaccurate at best and discriminatory at worst. Players from the subcontinent couyld never get very high up the rankings and players from Australia, England, South Africa and the West Indies would always be ranked higher than their achievements warranted.

Brian Lara retained no.1 spot in the rankings for several months even after his falling out with the team management and his subsequent spell out of the team in 1997-8.

Matthew Hayden remained stuck on no.1 after his 380 vs. a weak Zimbabwe side, even when other batsmen in Australia and abroad were performing more consistently.

Mark Taylor was never outside the top 10 (maybe even top 5) even though he had a long lean patch before he made his 334* vs. Pakistan in 1999.

At these times, Inzamam, Tendulkar, Dravid etc. were never in the top 10.

The current rankings are a continuation of the old one, simply repackaged as the LG ICC Rankings (after LG's sponsorship deal with ICC). But this one often gives Indian and Pakistani players an unfairly high ranking, a testament to the Indian subcontinent being the commercial capital of the cricketing world and LG's desire to sell its products there.

International players have repeatedly said they pay no attention to their own ranking, even the ICC sanctioned ones. Notably, MS Dhoni never even knew he was the top ranked ODI batsman after scoring 186* vs. SL, even though Ponting was more consistent that year.

Other ranking systems are even more bu****it than the LG rankings. ESPN StarSport's rankings (for Indian subcontinent viewers) once had Pedro Collins and Mervyn Dillon at the top of the world bowling rankings, this at a time the Windies were probably weaker than Zimbabwe. TenSports, another cable TV channel here, had an even more baseless ranking, with the top batsmen were usually those with the highest strike rates (Symonds, KP, Gilchrist and Flintoff), while the top bowlers were simply a listing those with the lowest average and eceonomy rates (McGrath, Pollock, Vaas etc), although the bowling ratings were arguably more acceptable than the batting ratings.

Put simply, rankings, in any sport, will never reflect the true abilities of the players involved. A recent International Association of Football Historian and Statisticians ranking put Ali Daei (scored 5 goals in a 17-0 trashing of Maldives by Iran) above Johan Cruyff and George Best, just to give an idea of the folly of taking these rankings seriously....Show more

That is what we get a BS system maintained by a BS ICC.
Good thing about it is, someone keeping track of the statistics
and weird reasoning they have implemented a system that does
not make sense. This is another one similar to the D/L rules,
20/20 bowl-out, tours arrangement etc.

How can one be on the top#1, when a player has not played for
so long? The calculation system that does that is screwed to
start with.

So I do not even count what it says, let alone if someone claims to be #1......or #100.
So as a cricket fan, I do not even look at those ICC rankings.

Anyone tell me one one thing, what has ICC done since its
inception as a board. All I can say it has failed to keep boards
under check or its own board members. Neither it has expanded the game, other than listing a bunch of countries
that play cricket on their web site. Great job....Show more

I've always thought that the ranking system was grossly unfair (and suspect) as half the time they make no sense whatsoever. The margin of error used in the system to calculate the rankings has too high of an error margin, at the moment it can only be used as a rough estimate (at best). Sometimes a batter who is performing extremely well and getting lots of runs will not move anywhere on the list, while a batter who has done nothing will be higher up.

This has happened on too regular basis, and taking the example of Hussey for a second, he has done nothing in the last few months to justify his current position (neither has Ponting actually) but players like Hayden (who scored 3 centuries in the recent series with India) and Pietersen (who is nearly always the top scorer for England) who are consistent scorers have gone nowhere significantly higher in the table.

Is it fair? never. Is it a true representation of a players performance? No.

Maybe I'm just reading it wrong. I'm not particularly statistically minded at the best of times lol.

Edit: I am happy that Sidebottom is finally in the top 10 of bowlers though....Show more