Cricket is such an odd sport.

“OK, settle down, sceptics and cynics 😀.  I hear you, but this is not your moment.”

The oddity I am wanting to observe is that when men’s cricket is played on the international stage, there are not one, but three, varieties to the game. What other sport is like this one? One format is the oldest and longest version, Test cricket (born in 1877), which can be played for five days and involves each team batting not once, but twice. Then there is One Day International (ODI) cricket which is played, rather unsurprisingly, over a single day and involves each team bowling 300 balls, spread over 50×6-ball ‘overs’, at each other. Then there is Twenty20 (T20) cricket which is played over an evening, or an afternoon, and involves each team bowling just 20 overs at each other. In the women’s game, ODI and T20 cricket is the sole focus (for reasons that I do not fully understand). 

Test. ODI. T20. So, for the uninitiated, Test cricket is like a slow, delicious Christmas dinner; ODI cricket is like a sumptuous dessert; while T20 cricket is like a bag of lollies. Oh dear, now my tastebuds are in overdrive. What to do? I find myself transported back to Delhi, a city in a land in such crisis at the moment. We need to start again. Test cricket is like having a meal at Karim’s, with its moghul cuisine, in the alleys behind Jama Masjid in Old Delhi; ODI cricket is like moving on to a burdened table at the Bengali Sweet House in Bengali Market, a short, calorie-dispersing walk from Connaught Place; … and T20 cricket? What is T20 cricket like? It is that box of fresh petha, delivered from Agra, awaiting me when I return home for the evening.

In the men’s game, ODI cricket has had a World Cup since 1975, with New Zealand playing in the last two finals. T20 cricket has had a World Cup since 2007. But Test cricket has never had a World Cup. However, later this month is the inaugural World Test Championship Final. Finally, after 144 years! New Zealand has made its way into the final — to be played against the land of my childhood, the womb that nurtured my love for the game, the great nation of India itself. A people of 5 million is taking on a people of 1.3 billion. May the best team the team from the smallest nation win.

While each flavour of cricket has its own system of rankings, I have never seen any effort to provide an integrated ranking that attempts to produce the best cricket nation across all three formats in the men’s game. It is being done for the first time here 😀 — as far as I know and I don’t know a lot — on this blog. Did I hear a drum roll? Yes, I believe I did…

1. With the help of my brother, Mark —a maestro with the spreadsheet — the first thing we did was normalize each of the Test, ODI, and T20 rankings. The highest ranked team was given a rating of 100. Then the numbers drop away from there…

2. Then we weighted these nomalized rankings, by a factor of 3 (Test), 2 (ODI) and 1 (T20) — in an effort, with the purist anyway, to acknowledge that Test cricket is the most important form of the game.

3. Finally, by adding up these weighted numbers, we create the rankings for the Best Cricketing Nations across all three formats. I’ll call it the Patient Purist ranking (as of 1 June 2021, for those nations featuring in the ‘top ten’ across all three formats):

Ahh, just as well I am neither nationalist, nor patriot. These are against my religion, incompatible with the Christian faith, in my view! Nevertheless I’ll still be keeping one sleepy eye (as it comes into the NZ timezone overnight) on that World Test Championship Final from 18-22 June.

nice chatting

Paul