Cricket at the bottom

Here we look at the teams with the lowest rankings in various formats.

Tests: Zimbabwe is in 10th place with Bangladesh above. Ireland and Afghanistan are not ranked as they have not played enough Tests.

ODIs: Papua New Guinea is in 20th place, with Nepal above.

T20Is: Turkiye, Thailand, Eswatini, Seychelles, Estonia and Cameroon all have zero points and are ranked between 79 and 84. Eswatini and Estonia have played the most matches, so we may consider them at the bottom. Estonia is the only ex-Soviet Union country which plays international cricket.

Women’s Tests: No rankings as very few matches are played.

Women’s ODIs: Zimbabwe in 11th place, with Ireland above it.

Women’s T20Is: Eswatini, Singapore, Norway and Peru all have zero points and are ranked between 50 and 53. Singapore has played the most matches, and thus can be considered to be the bottom team.

Special note: China and Russia are not seen in these rankings. But some former Communist countries such as Bulgaria and Romania are there along with Estonia.

Based on https://www.espncricinfo.com/rankings/content/page/211271.html as on Nov 28.

Statistics of ODIs of 2020

The number of matches in all formats got reduced due to “unforeseen circumstances”. However, we still have some aggregates which are of some utility even if averages and strike rates are not meaningful.

We start with the ICC rankings at the end of the year:

Which has England, India, New Zealand and Australia as the top 4 teams.

A simple comparison of W-L ratios gives this:

Not really meaningful as the top 3 teams here (Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan) have played too few matches. Then we have Oman (!) followed by SA and NZ which still doesn’t make much sense.

A summary of individual performances follows.

Batting-most runs (250 and above):

That’s more like it. Finch leads by a large margin over his team-mate SPD Smith. Rahul and Kohli are 5th and 6th.

And Labuschagne, the Test find of 2019 is 3rd here.

The most 100s are 3 by SPD Smith. The most 50+ scores are 7 by Finch followed by 5 by Smith and Kohli.

Highest innings (100 and more):

All the centuries are listed here:

Unusually, the only scores above 150 are from Bangladesh. The highest from India is 119 by RG Sharma.

Bowling – most wickets (8 and above):

Zampa with 27 wickets is far ahead of the second-placed AS Joseph.

The most 4wi hauls is 3 by AS Joseph

No one has more than one 5wi.

M Shami has the most wickets for India (12).

Best innings bowling (All instances of 4wi):

The fast-rising S Lamichane of Nepal has the best figures of 6-16, which came against USA, another one of the newcomers. The only other 6-wicket haul was by the relatively inexperienced L Ngidi

India’s best is quite far down, being Shami’s 4-63.

Most dismissals (5 or more):

The most dismissals are 15 by Carey (Aus) and Hope (WI). The most by a non-keeper is 10 by Starc.

Rahul had the most stumpings (2).

For India, Kohli has 5 dismissals.

Most innings dismissals (4 and more):

The highest is 5 by Hope, and three others have 4 each. The best for India is 3 by Rahul on two occasions.

Several non-keepers have taken 3 catches in an innings.

All-round match performances (30 runs and 3wi):

The best would seem to be the two instances by Aqib Ilyas of Oman, followed by JJ Smit of Namibia.

Test matches of 2019-General summary

The summary of all the Tests played in the calendar year 2019. Here the teams are ranked by win/loss ratio. India is at the top with 7 wins and no losses, while Ireland and Bangladesh lost all their matches. Australia and Afghanistan (!) are next to India. Zimbabwe did not play any Test in this year, though they will resume in January 2020.

The ICC ranking tables at the end of the year are more meaningful:

A more realistic assessment, with Afghanistan overtaking Zimbabwe besides Ireland.

According to this, New Zealand is India’s closest rival with South Africa, England and Australia in joint third position (though they are actually separated by small fractions).

Then there is the new contest, the World Test Championship. Not all Test countries are involved. Even among the 9 countries involved, not all Test series are counted. An example is the 2-Test tour of England to New Zealand. This was the WTC points table at the end of the year:

It is still at an early stage, but it does seem that the other teams will not find it easy to catch up with India and Australia. By the middle of January, Australia had moved up to 296 and England to 86.

Snippets from Aus-NZ Test series

The 3-Test series ended in a clean sweep for Australia. Earlier in 2019-20 Australia had also swept Pakistan 2-0. All these 5 Tests ended in 4 days or less. A brief summary:

All 5 of these Tests ended on the 4th day.

They are duly recorded in the list of clean-sweep series:

http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/records/283942.html

And Australia’s captain TD Paine is presently the only Test captain who is a wicketkeeper. His Pakistani counterpart has been dropped since January 2019:

NZ set an unwanted record during this series-their 256 in the first innings of the 3rd Test is the lowest top score by a team in a Test series of 3 or more matches:

The previous record was set by South Africa in their tour of Australia in 1993-94. That was a somewhat less one-sided series than this and was drawn 1-1.

A summary of New Zealand’s totals:

Even the top score of 256 included a 5-run penalty after DA Warner was found to be running on the pitch during Australia’s second innings.

And the World Test Championship saw Australia getting a full 120 points and New Zealand none. Here is the WTC points table on 06 Jan 2020 which included this series as well as the first Test between South Africa vs England, which was won by the former giving them 30 points.

See how Australia is creeping up towards India’s total.

 

Review of cricket team performance in 2016

Here we look at the ICC rankings in all three formats as on Dec 31, 2016 as well as the wins and losses during the calendar year.

There will not be a direct correlation between the ICC ranking and wins/losses as the ICC rankings take into account a longer period.

Tests:

ODIs:

T20Is:

It can be seen that both table toppers are the same for Tests and T20Is, but not in ODIs.