it’s quite clear that there is no extra weightage for away wins (or home losses). This means that if a team plays a dispropotionate amount of cricket at home, it can go up the rankings. [...]
Also, the rankings don’t take into account the margin of victory/defeat. As far as they’re concerned, a 1-run win is just as good as a win by an innings and 400 runs. Similarly, a draw with both teams scoring an equal number of runs is the same as a draw in which a team was 1 wicket away from an innings defeat. [...]
I guess what I’m trying to say is there is way too much talk of ratings & rankings when all teams and fans should be worried about is their team trying to win every test they play. It doesn’t matter if you’re ranked 1 or 10, if you pull out of a chase with 15 overs to bat/bowl just because you’re tired or think it’s impossible to score 6 an over you’re cheating the fans of a proper result.

I have written before about the difficulty in determining the order of the superiority of the cricket teams. There are so many factors (victory margins, dead rubber matches, luck, weather and team changes) involved that you cannot make an accurate judgment. Of course, some things are beyond doubt, for example, that England is better than Bangladesh, but it is not clear whether Pakistan or New Zealand is a better team today. Trying to establish a fool-proof methodology is in itself foolish.

But all things considered, if we accord meaning to the Test rankings by the ICC, then everyone has to play by the ICC’s rules. So if Zimbabwe wants to be the #1 team in the world, then they need to earn the points under that framework. Also, you are allowed to celebrate when your team becomes #1, but you are not allowed to complain when another team achieves it under the same rules.

So, for India, if they think the #1 ranking is important, they can go play and earn the points to get it back. If they don’t believe that, that is fine too. But what is not negotiable is that India should go and not perform. As an Indian cricket fan, I want to see Dhoni and Co. go beat all the teams out there. If that makes a difference to their rankings, that is a bonus. But the important thing is playing well and trying to win, if not actually winning.

Mandatory DRS: I am very happy about this. Of course, we have this weird compromise between the BCCI and the ICC with the ball-tracking technology being removed. But it is a start to making umpires accountable, improving their standards and also reducing sham incidents in matches.

No runners in international cricket: I don’t understand who had this as a big priority item. There have been a few cynical incidents involving runners, but I didn’t know that this was such a burning problem. Having a runner is a double-edged sword in that the batsman can conserve some energy, but also be out on some stupid confusion. So not sure what difference this will make on the average.

New balls from both ends in ODIs: May make for smaller targets with the top order crumbling more often than usual. I would have also provided an option for allowing one side to change a ball after the 30th over just to keep things interesting.

Batting and bowling Powerplays to be taken between overs 16 and 40: This is excellent and goes to show how clueless the ICC was when they introduced extra Powerplays without such limitations. You would have thought that there should have been some discussion of making sure that the Powerplays are used to spice up the middle overs. Anyway, all’s well that ends well.

Captains to be suspended after only two over-rate breaches in a year, as opposed to the existing three: What a joke! Captains have over-rate problems when they are losing. A good captain (I am not talking about Ricky Ponting here) would rather be suspended than speed through the overs and end defeated. A much better way to do this would be to punish the errant team (if they bowl first) by reducing the overs they get to bat. Or if they bat first, then they will get the runs in their most productive overs cut off from the target for the second team. I don’t know about Tests, maybe have a reserve day for all the missing overs?

Batsmen can be dismissed obstructing the field if they change their course while running to prevent a run-out chance: Duh!

Bowlers will be allowed to run out a non-striker backing up unfairly: Duh again! I have never understood why this was supposed to be against the spirit of cricket. Someone explain to me why stealing several yards to make a run is okay while running out that person is supposed to be a horrible crime. As for the warning before dismissal, should a bowler warn a batsman that he has taken a wrong guard and not york him?

What is galling to me is that one of the most acrimonious Tests of all time, the Sydney Test, could have been India’s if there had been an umpire review system in place. India could have possibly drawn or won that Test and perhaps the Series. Remember the 1990-91 Test series in Australia. The jokes were “13 Australians versus 11 Indians” and “My eyes were not good for batting, so I became an umpire“. India could have been much higher in the rankings if it were not for bad umpiring when it went abroad.

Take a look at this chart of all the umpiring reviews. Most umpires get at least one of 5 controversial decisions wrong. A few like Harper and Selva lose almost half their reviews. How many matches went the wrong way before we had the UDRS in place? How many batsmen went on to score match-turning centuries despite being clearly out? How many batsmen lost their place because of a silly umpiring decision? Not to mention the bad blood between players and teams because of controversial decisions. There have been hundreds of reviews and at least a hundred that have been overturned.

But of course, what am I talking about? India is now at the top of the Test rankings. So obviously, they want to play it safe by eliminating anything that could threaten that.

John Dyson committed a MISTAKE. Even as the West Indies have won their first series against a major Test nation after a long time, Dyson, at least for the short-term, will be remembered for this amazing piece of incompetence. The only thing that may perhaps comfort him is that he is not alone. The South Africans famously messed up their 2003 World Cup campaign by hitting a drawing score instead a winning one, and then crashing out. Dyson went one better, by choosing a losing score, though the ramifications are not as severe as exiting a World Cup. This mistake is now immortalized in his Wikipedia entry.

Which leads me to my conclusion: The Duckworth-Lewis calculations may be lucid to statisticians and those inclined towards math and numbers, but apparently they are heavy going for sports persons and coaches. One option may be to make the charts much easier. But another option is to provide the details right there on the giant scorecard in the stadium itself. Here is the simplest form:

WI behind by 1 run

This information would be updated at all times by a certified Duckworth-Lewis computer program after every ball. In addition, every player on and off the field would have a pager-like device that would provide this information and also allow captains and coaches to explore scenarios such as what happens if one or more wickets are lost. All the information would be streamed from a single source so that there can be no point of confusion.

The main effect of this rule comes in the 2nd innings when the batting team is chasing a consequential total. Just when the bowling team may think that they have the run rate under control, the batting team takes the Powerplay and takes enough off them to reduce the run rate to a pressureless 4-5 runs per over. Since the fielding team does not know when the Powerplay will be taken, they are sometimes forced to bowl out some bowlers (such as spin bowlers) to avoid disaster in the Powerplay. Previously, some spinners (Saqlain Mushtaq, Anil Kumble) would be held back even for the final over.

In the long term, this could also play the opposite way too. Once batting teams understand that they could make a lot more off the Powerplay, they may decide to take it easy during the regular overs and bet huge on the batting Powerplay. But in between, they could lose good wickets and when the Powerplay comes, they don’t have good batsmen to take advantage of the Powerplay.

Secondly, the need for making maximum use of Powerplay may result in some injudicious slogging resulting in lost wickets and missed run-making opportunities because of mindless swings. And finally, while the batting team may get a lot of runs off the Powerplay, they may not get enough to get them out of the hole they are in. As an example, consider the just-concluded match between India and Sri Lanka.

In the first innings, the timing of the Powerplay can be challenging. Ideally, you want two genuine batsmen already set, but not too tired, who are capable of piercing the inner fielding circle and finding the gaps in the boundary. The problem is that if you wait too long, there is a greater chance that you would lose many wickets and your lower order is left to make sense of the Powerplay. If you do it too soon, the batsmen may not feel ready to take big risks, especially if they are already 3 or 4 wickets down. Sometime between the 35th and 45th over seems to be a good time from a logical standpoint, but we will have to  see how this works in practice after seeing this in action in more matches.

Let’s say that Team A wins the first Test. This means that they cannot lose the series. So the only thing left for the other team is to draw the series by winning the 2nd Test. On the other hand, if it was a 3-Test series, both teams have an incentive to win the 2nd Test, Team A to win the series outright and Team B to tie it to set up the 3rd Test for a series decider. The 2-Test series only has a series decider if the first Test is a draw. 

Also, the 2 Test series prevents a comeback victory for Team B. Think of the 2001 India-Australia series. If it was a 2-Test series, the amazing Indian return-from-the-jaws-of-defeat would have resulted in a 1-1 draw and not set up the thrilling finale.

On the subject of resources, a great site to keep track while England matches are going on is the excellent Guardian site which has over-by-over (OBO, as they call it) of the matches, as opposed to the ball-by-ball coverage at Cricinfo. Be warned, both sites sometimes run into technical snags not infrequently.