World Test Championship : Performance by Team

- The top 8 teams, are all actually quite competitive. Only Bangladesh are an outlier at the bottom of the pile.

- The big 3 lead in win-loss ratio, reinforcing the idea that they are the best teams across conditions.

- New Zealand's championship in the first cycle was a great achievement, although they've fallen off a bit since.

- Sri Lanka's performance is surprisingly good

- Even with Bazball, England's scoring rate is only marginally better than Australia's

- Scoring rates seem to be averaging around 3.3 runs per over, which is a happy medium between too boring and slow, and too T20-influenced IMO

Forgot to mention the most surprising thing so far…India isn’t the top team in terms of win loss ratio. That is striking because the seem to always steamroll all opponents at home and then perform admirably away (usually on friendly surfaces, just sayin). Total mindfuck to see Australia in #1 position.

Australia were fortunate that Pakistan dropped so many catches. Just as Pakistan were in the ascendancy Abdullah Shafique would normally put one down in the slip cordon. What was hard to believe is that they kept putting him in the slip cordon, even after he had put down 3-4 easy catches.

Pakistan have historically had the worst slip cordon in cricket...their slip fielders are now even worse than Bangladesh's, who are actually quite decent.

Regardless, Australia's dominance at the top of WTC table is a bit surprising. I'd have thought India would easily be up on top!

What is clear is that almost every major tournament is going to be won by Australia, India, or England unless something drastic changes. Cricket is going to get pretty boring without stories like the Sri Lanka ODI team of the 90s or the West Indies team of the 80s.

> eugene wrote: ↑Sun Feb 04, 2024 12:49 am What is clear is that almost every major tournament is going to be won by Australia, India, or England unless something drastic changes. Cricket is going to get pretty boring without stories like the Sri Lanka ODI team of the 90s or the West Indies team of the 80s.

Then be prepared to be bored. The Big 3 will only keep getting stronger...they mostly play amongst themselves and occaisionally play the Next 6. On top of that even their developmental teams (A and U-19) only play amongst themselves.

For me, following cricket has become about watching to see if/when the N6 can pull off the upset against B3. New Zealand's win in WTC 1 was thus quite special.

I guess the excitement is seeing how many major tournaments India don't win?! They are on quite a streak at the moment.

> eugene wrote: ↑Sun Feb 04, 2024 9:29 pm I guess the excitement is seeing how many major tournaments India don't win?! They are on quite a streak at the moment.



Seriously though, the WTC forces the Big 3 to play 4 series vs other sides. It may not be perfect, but its solid. I also don't mind them playing 5 Test series whilst Bangladesh and Sri Lanka only get 2 each. As long as the smaller sides are still playing 6 series per cycle, they will be getting plenty of games.

> Kriterion_BD wrote: ↑Wed Jan 31, 2024 3:41 am Forgot to mention the most surprising thing so far…India isn’t the top team in terms of win loss ratio. That is striking because the seem to always steamroll all opponents at home and then perform admirably away (usually on friendly surfaces, just sayin). Total mindfuck to see Australia in #1 position.

Very good thread Kriterion. You are right, I would have thought India quite easily have the best W/L ratio!!! I have my doubts over how we go about from here on though, get a feeling we are now past our best period.

Other numbers are on expected lines. I'm actually a bit surprised that Bangladesh have only 2 wins! Thought they have a few at home!

Pakistan actually have better numbers than I had expected.

Bangladesh inching up just a tad. They've got a series in Windies to try and close that gap a little further. Also have South Africa at home and India away.

Next update coming as soon as the last WTC 3 games get completed in the coming weeks.

South Africa vs TBD in the final!

Test ricket has actually never been more competitive. Australia losing a test at home to West Indies, NZ winning 3-0 in India but losing to SL, England losing to SL at home but beating NZ away, Pakistan beating England. A number of big results with many away from home.

> eugene wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2025 5:49 am Test ricket has actually never been more competitive. Australia losing a test at home to West Indies, NZ winning 3-0 in India but losing to SL, England losing to SL at home but beating NZ away, Pakistan beating England. A number of big results with many away from home.

Agreed. Will be interesting to compare the overall competitiveness in the WTC era vs previous eras.

> eugene wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2025 5:49 am Test ricket has actually never been more competitive. Australia losing a test at home to West Indies, NZ winning 3-0 in India but losing to SL, England losing to SL at home but beating NZ away, Pakistan beating England. A number of big results with many away from home.

I just ran some numbers on a google spreadsheet...its just one measure of "competitiveness", and it turns out that the WTC era of 2019-present is actually very slightly LESS competitive than the decade preceding the WTC.

What I did was take every teams record and apply the current WTC points system to calculate Percentage Points Earned. Then I took the standard deviation of that percentage for the 10 Test teams (excluded Afghanistan and Ireland who only appeared towards the end of the decade). The difference is very minute - 0.15 vs 0.13 being the standard deviation of the percentages, with the WTC era actually having the larger std dev and hence being slightly LESS competitive.

However there could be other equally valid ways of measuring competitiveness. For example, what is the average number of opponents each team beats in a given time period.

The lack of draws now might affect things also? Only 3 drawn tests in 2024 I think?

> eugene wrote: ↑Mon Jan 06, 2025 5:08 am The lack of draws now might affect things also? Only 3 drawn tests in 2024 I think?

Yeah that has to be the confounding variable. If you look at the results, you feel the game is far MORE competitive now than it was 10 years ago. Also the difference was quite small, so if you throw in some more draws it might bring all the sides even closer together.

With WTC 3 having concluded (the Final still forthcoming), its time to update the OP from 13 months ago.

1) Australia | 33 wins, 11 losses, 9 draws | 1 Title

2) India | 31 wins, 19 losses, 6 draws

3) England | 32 wins, 25 losses, 8 draws

4) South Africa | 21 wins, 17 losses, 2 draws

5) New Zealand | 19 wins, 17 losses, 3 draws | 1 Title

6) Pakistan | 13 wins, 20 losses, 7 draws

7) Sri Lanka | 12 wins, 20 losses, 5 draws

8) West Indies | 10 wins, 23 losses, 6 draws

9) Bangladesh | 5 wins, 24 losses, 2 draws

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- If you look at the win-loss ratio, the Aussies are clearly the most dominant team since 2019. India really stumbled in the past year, which is understandable given the team has so many players who are likely past their prime.

- The top 5 teams are clearly a solid notch above the rest.

- Sri Lanka may not feel satisfied with their ranking, but their overall performance is actually quite good given how mediocre they have been since 2015.

- Pakistan and Bangladesh could be significantly better if they could figure out how to win Tests at home. Nearly half of Pakistan's wins (6 out of 13) have come in overseas Tests - which is not surprising in a historical sense, because Pakistan have always excelled away due the strength of their fast bowling. For Bangladesh, its a sign of how far they've come along that 4 of their 5 wins have come away from home, with 2 of those being outside Asia (in West Indies and New Zealand).

- As poor as the Windies have been for a quarter century now, they are NOT actually disgracing themselves at the highest level.