Saturday, March 15, 2008

Smith Displaces Tendulkar for Top Spot

Smith displaced Tendulkar for the top spot in the ICC ODI Batsman rankings. Ponting, M Yousuf and Hayden round up the top 5. The age old saying of nothing beats experience is demonstrated in the ODI batsman rankings.

Vettori is on top of the ODI rankings for bowlers with Bracken, Bond, Vaas and Mills completing the top 5. 3 of the top 5 ODI ranked bowlers are Kiwis.

Australia and New Zealand are definitely dominating the ICC ODI rankings. The rankings are definitely a good way of determining current form - though I would like to see some revisions to the rankings. This will have to be a later post when I have constructed exactly what I would like to see changed :-)

I will leave by saying that ICC should also publish their ICC ODI Umpire Rankings! :-)

Make your pitch on this post...



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9 Pitched:

  1. David Barry said...
     

    I'll be intrigued when you've worked out what you'd like changed in the player ratings. They do a very good job at what they're supposed to do - rank players in terms of their recent performances.

  2. David Barry said...
     

    Though there is one problem with them - players on the winning side get bonuses. This biases towards successful sides.

    That's the only real problem I see.

  3. NAzhar said...
     

    yeah i agree with that bias and I also think they need to take into account players who have not played.

    For example, Shoaib Akhtar was in the top 10 in the test bowling ratings...now he has played so few matches cause of fitness...I think there needs to be a penalty for that.

    Secondly, I think cricket needs to give more weight to intangibles....3/36 bowling effort can have impacts of varying degrees depending on the context...

    again these are ramblings on how they can improve the ratings....though i agree with u that it is the best current system, but there is always room for improvement in everything :-)

  4. Jrod said...
     

    Graeme SMith is rated number one, doesn't he lose a thousand points for being a complete wanker?

    Thats in the rules isnt it?

  5. David Barry said...
     

    If a player misses a Test, the player loses 1% of their ratings points. A player who misses an ODI loses 0.5% of their ratings points.

    The ratings take into account the number of runs scored in the match. So, if, eg, a team is all out 100, and one bowler takes 3/36, that doesn't get rewarded as highly as taking 3/36 when a team makes 400.

    Taking the wicket of a better batsman (as judged by their ratings points) earns more points than taking the wicket of a worse batsman.

    Those are the two main "contexts" that you would consider when doing a ratings system.

    The only other one that you might be thinking of is, say, the batsman who rescues his team from 8/100 to 250, or the bowler who causes a collapse when it looks like his team will lose.

    But if he bowled earlier in the innings, then he should have taken wickets earlier. And if he didn't bowl earlier in the innings, then he got great figures anyway.

    I think there is perhaps a case for rewarding batsmen who 'rescue' a team.

    And remember that you can't use "intangibles" when designing a ratings system - you have to be able to quantify them!

  6. Q said...
     

    Uncle J, we need to notify that to the ICC and make sure they implement stuff like that in the future..

    Scoring 100s against a nunmber 9 rated Bangladesh side pushed a man above another who scored 100s against a number 1 rate Australia - definitely something wrong there.

    Another blemish I see - Bond is right up there, yet he is a 'rebel' cause he's playing in the ICL, which has effectively ended his international career. Shouldn't the ICC take him out of the ratings?

    One more problem I have - it takes into account recent performances. Ponting averaged 19 in his last 10 ODI innings yet he is in the top 3, which is definitely not reflective of recent form.

    Despite this, these are the best ratings around - far better than the samsung, espn, tensports, etc which are all quite BS.

  7. David Barry said...
     

    Q, as I understand things (and I can't find the details on the ICC website), the ICC ratings work by considering a player's entire career, but with the importance decaying exponentially as you go back in time. I'm not sure what the decay constant is, but I'm guessing they'd make it so that most of the player's rating comes from the last 18 or 24 months. So a lean run over the last couple of months will hurt Ponting's rating a little bit, but not too much.

    If the decay constant were such that Ponting fell out of the top ten based on 10 bad innings following an extended run of high scoring, then you'd see a huge amount of variability in the rankings, and people wouldn't pay much attention to them.

  8. David Barry said...
     

    I found a website that says that the decay constant is 4% per match. I don't know how reliable that figure is, but if it's true, then Ponting's last 10 matches contribute about one third of his ratings points. The 27 games before that also contribute one third, and over that period he averaged almost 80. So you can see how he is still in the top three.

  9. Q said...
     

    Yeah that makes sense David. Ponting definitely deserves to be there, i was just wondering how much of the recent performance effects the rating since he done quite badly as compared to before. An average drop of 60!

    I agree that people wont pay much attention if people drop out of the top 10 too quickly.

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