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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I always thought that the way the rankings were worke dout depended upon a player's performances, with his most recent ones carrying more weight than less recent ones. Also, the type of conditions and the bowling attack faced play a part in the number of points awarded for each performance.

Therefore, a 70 scored against an Australian attack of Lee, Clark, Johnson et al would carry more weight, and so gain more points, than a 130 scored against Bangladesh.

This makesit fairer than just saying that the batsman with the highest average is the best.

As for Hussey being named number one in the rankings, well, he can't help it Australia haven't played for a month. He's not going to lose points due to that (although players do lose points for each match they miss).

The players who have had matches have had the opportunity to cement their positions at the top. As they have performed poorly, their points tallies have suffered as a result.

In terms of whether Hussey actually deserves to be number one anyway,I have my doubts. He didn't set the world alight with his performance against India. He had obviously built up a big enough tally from previous achievements, and this hasn't decresed to the extent where when other players above them decrease their tallies, he stays beneath them.

I think the rankings system are actually quite a good indication of how players are performing, and who is best at each moment in time.

Remember they look at quality, not just quantity.

It will always throw up anomalies such as this though.

But that is cricket: without controversy it wouldn't be half the game it is.

its not really fair but people have too respect that the rankings system can't be perfect and never will be. its the most accurate available and its more complicated than sending a cat to neptune to collect soil samples

its a good guide on roughly whos the best

EDIT- monti you've gota realise the rankings are based aggragate form not skill how could a calculation know that vaughan is a better batsman than vettori all it knows is that vettori is in better form than vaughn which is correct.

Im getting sick of people getting all angry about the rankings because their favorite player isnt at number 1 or whatever they are just a guide and dont have any bearing on any matches or proformance they are just another stat so get over it guys. when you hear people dicussing somebody great like viv richards do they even analyse his rankings? no because its a useless stat for those who need some sort of form guide and has no bearing on talent.

EDIT 2- also monti if you look closely at that all time list you will see its just the top 20 highest batsman ratings of their career and its rubbish because somebody could score like 10 hundreds in 10 innings and get a really high rating of like 900 but then score absolutely no runs for 20 years and still be on that list

Yes it is fair because the icc calculates this on a points system so sangakarra must have have dropped points to move behind mike hussey you can view the points on www.cricinfo.com

I always believed that the ICC ranking system is unfair.

But, they have some system of points, and it applies to each and every player.

Edit:

The biggest problem with it is it gives too much importance to current performance. I made this point much earlier in an answer to a question, and was given too many thumbs down.

And Sachin at 25 clearly means that it is useless crap.

Thats grossly unfair. But Mr. Speed is a very "respected" representative of Cricket Australia and you can;t accuse him of CHEATING.

Omg, don't forward this to the Aussie media. I dont wanna he Harbhajan Part 2. LMFAO !

And who cares for those LG ICC Cricket Rankings. They're crap and MADE UP. I prefer to watch the matches, not the MANIPULATED rankings