The learning curve can be quite steep in international cricket, although Bangladesh have now shown some signs of improvement since they started. Their performance in Tests is still quite dismal, and it is therefore worthwhile to compare how other countries fared in their first 25 Tests and 25 ODIs. It is often forgotten that India and New Zealand took some 20 and 25 years respectively to record their first Test wins. Here we see a tabulation of all Test-playing countries in their first 25 matches:
It can be seen that England (closely followed by Pakistan) lead the table. New Zealand, Zimbabwe, India and Sri Lanka had a rather unimpressive run of wins but were able to draw more consistently than Bangladesh.
Australia is the only team to win its first Test, and Zimbabwe the only one to draw its first Test. The other 8 teams all lost their first Tests.
Now let us look at the first 25 ODIs for the top 12 teams at the moment, being the 10 Test nations plus Afghanistan and Ireland. As in the case of Tests, we have removed the multinational teams. Apart from the ICC XI there are Africa XI and Asia XI to be removed.
Afghanistan and Ireland have a bit of an advantage as they played more matches against lower-ranked teams which are on the fringes of ODIs, though not good enough to dine at the high table of the main ICC rankings. As we might guess, the West Indies were the big bosses from the beginning though Afghanistan and England tie for the second place, closely followed by Australia. Zimbabwe and Bangladesh take up the bottom. Bangladesh sadly is at the bottom in both formats.
4 of these teams won their first ODI: Afghanistan, Australia, New Zealand and Zimbabwe while the other 10 lost their first matches.
It might be instructive to see how they fared in their first 50 Tests and 50 ODIs.
abn397 