Sunday, December 06, 2009

Some statistics happen, and India become best in the world

It’s official. Again. Some team other than Australia is the best in the world, accordingly to faceless statisticians hidden in the neglected bunkers of Dubai’s crumbling skyscrapers.

That team is India. They have long held a team capable of destroy all before them, but it has taken them much bedding down and reorganising before they have done so. Although, more or less the same group of bland, school clerkish type men have dominated the side for the last decade, they have only “come good” after Australia have refrained from winning quite so regularly.

So, seeing as I had a touch of spreadsheetitus recently, I thought, how does India’s decade look? Worthy of “best in the world” status?

Here is a graph of some stuff:

Same rules as last time: +1 point for winning, -1 for losing and no points for drawing.

India are currently scoring their highest in the decade, with them presently on +13. Not quite as high as England +19 when the ICC had them as the second best team in the world, but pretty good, nevertheless.

So, what does this say? Exel is good? ICC is bad?

Their recovery from the bogged-down under-achieving period of the early decade seems sustained. But this improvement, although steady since 2005, is not dramatic.

Probably not worthy of Number One status. But, the only problem is that all the Number Twos are shit.

5 comments:

Butjazz said...

Completely agree.
In fact I did an excel sheet analysis on my blog as well - i factored in 5 years instead of the 10 you took so that I could the older results. The result was the same. It's premature to remove Australia from the top perch.

And I did bother to do all the analysis because I was convinced that this new ranking was bullshit. I am sure it was the same pre-feeling which made you make the effort..

Cricket Betting Blog said...

I find it hard to understand how a team who hardly plays test cricket can be ranked the best test team in the world.

Maybe I am missing the point, I don't know!

Anonymous said...

India is number 1 in the world for lots of things.

The Atheist said...

Tuk-tuk accidents? Air pollution? Fake watches?

Anonymous said...

No I have never seen fake watches.

Diarrhea yes