Rediff cricket rankings

The Rediff Cricket Rankings is a system for ranking international cricket teams devised by the late MJ Manohar Rao of the University of Mumbai and Srinivas Bhogle while he was at India's National Aerospace Laboratories. It was originally known as the Rao-Bhogle Index (RBI).

The system uses a two-step formula to give a stronger weighting to good performances in difficult circumstances (away from home or against stronger opposition).

How ratings are calculated

Rao & Bhogle start by creating a matrix of results for ten international cricket teams (Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies and Zimbabwe) where the most recent home and away series between each team are included in the matrix. The percentage of games won home and away for each team is then calculated. So, in the May 2006 rankings for example, Australia won 18/22 (82%) at home and 20/26 (77%) away while Zimbabwe won 1.5/14 (11%) at home and 2.5/17 (15%) away.

In the second step of the process, those figures are fed back into the calculations. So, for example, India get much better value for their drawn test series in Australia than their home win against Zimbabwe

The One Day International (ODI) rankings are more complicated than the test rankings. Because there are a number of ODI tournaments featuring more than two teams, the ODI rankings include an additional subset for games played at neutral venues and an extra ranking component for overall performance in tournaments.

This latter factor is termed the tournament index and is calculated by assigning points to each team based on their position in each tournament over the previous year. So, for example, the VB Series tournament between Australia, Sri Lanka and South Africa in January 2006 gave 2 points out of 2 to the winners Australia, 1/2 to runners-up Sri Lanka and 0/2 to last-placed South Africa. The tournament index is then combined with the main weighted index in a ratio of 1:4, which has been empirically validated.

Bangladesh is now (starting 2007) included in these rankings. The early rationale for Bangladesh's exclusion was that they hadn't played enough games for the matrix to work correctly, but as of mid-2006, Bangladesh had played test series at home against all the other nine test teams and visited all but India for test series. Bangladesh is now also included in the ODI ratings.

ee also

* Cricket Rating Systems
* ICC Test Championship
* ICC ODI Championship
* Amul World Cricket Ratings
* AQB Sports Ratings
* XODI Extended ODI Cricket Ratings

External links

* [http://www.rediff.com/cricket/testrank.html Rediff test rankings]
* [http://in.rediff.com/cricket/odirank.html Rediff ODI rankings]