For some reason, the ICC Test ‘Championship’ (read ‘Perpetual League Table’) is occupying my thoughts today. Having now disregarded a malicious desire to construct a (non-trivial) ranking system that maintains Australian superiority indefinitely, I instead offer the following cluster of thoughts:
- Can it really be that the ICC points system fails to incorporate runs scored or wickets taken during a test? Intuitively, a team that loses narrowly deserves more respect than a team that plays a lot of what Bill Lawry calls ‘poor cricket’, and I would like to see this tackled directly. Of course there is great natural variation in both runs and wickets on account of ground conditions and locale, but surely this is removed by taking ratios (for runs) or differences (for wickets) between the teams. I imagine this being done on and innings-by-innings basis.
- There is this Belgian chap who has done some work on rankings incorporating batting and bowling averages. The page seems light on explication but the iterative correction (“The batting averages have been corrected by taking into account the bowling average of the opposition, and vice versa.”) looks pretty good. There seem to be some free parameters though: “The Combined Rating is equal to the difference between batting and bowling average, multiplied by 20.” Unless the 20 is for total number of wickets or something.
- I am only interested in team rankings, or rather ratings; individual ratings have long been a subject of study, not least (though incompletely) by Brendon in his pathbreaking article on Bayesian Estimation and Cricket. To what degree, however, can a team rating be successfully constituted of the individual ratings of its members? Conversely, given trustworthy team and individual ratings, can the importance of a team ‘functioning as a unit’ be quantified by a resulting discrepancy? In fact, I am willing to claim that if such a ‘constructive’ team rating algorithm could be implemented, it would perform more accurately (i.e. with respect to predictions of individual encounters) than the top-down methods practiced by virtually everyone.
Update: I hadn’t realised until now that the last time Australia lost every match in a series at home was in the 19th Century, i.e. pre-relativity. Could we avoid that happening again now please? I hope all members of the team realise that we don’t like them because of their winning personalities, and with that in mind wish them a Happy New Year. (More charitably: Best of luck to whichever of Bollinger and Hilfenhaus makes his debut tomorrow.)
Update the second: Match not starting ’til tommorow, obviously; I’d presumed it would be on a Friday, but of course they need more than two days of rest between tests and the Melbourne test has to start on the 26th irrespective of which day of the week that is. Also, Bollinger is in for Brett Lee and Andrew Macdonald (qui?) replaces Andrew Symonds, who is out filming commericals for Ford.
Update the third (07/01/09): Well, Australia has won a nail-biter. Congrats to Bollinger and Macdonald for turning in fairly solid performances, and especially to Peter Siddle for his Man of the Match performance. Though I only witnessed it through Cricinfo, Hayden’s dropped catch at the death is beyond the last straw: he should be dropped… from reality. As X. W. Halliwell remarked, that would be “an interesting selection decision.”
Letters to Nature 
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