By Adrian Meredith
By beating Ireland 3-0, Bangladesh are now the 4th
best team in Twenty20 cricket. This headline says it all, and just adds to the
absurdity of it. Bangladesh are now, according to official ICC rankings, the
4th best team in the world in Twenty20 cricket.
They were previously unranked, it should be noted, as, per
ICC rules, a team needs to have played 8 games before they get a ranking and,
before the 3 match series against Ireland, Bangladesh had only played 6 games.
They have now played 9 in the 3-year ranking period.
For the record, these are the 9 results:
1) Lost to West Indies by 5 wickets.
2) Lost to New Zealand by 10 wickets.
3) Lost to Pakistan by 21 runs.
4) Lost to Australia by 27 runs.
5) Defeated West Indies by 3 wickets.
6) Lost to Pakistan by 50 runs.
7) Defeated Ireland by 71 runs.
8) Defeated Ireland by 1 run.
9) Defeated Ireland by 2 wickets.
So, let's get this straight. Bangladesh have a 4-5 record in
9 matches and manage to be ranked 4th? They haven't defeated any of the top 3
teams, and, other than Ireland (ranked 11th), their only other victory was
against West Indies, who are currently ranked 9th.
So, in other words, they manage to be ranked 4th by
defeating a team ranked 9th once (and also losing to them once) and defeating
another team ranked 11th three times. In between time, they lost to teams ranks
5th (Pakistan, twice), 6th (Australia, once) and 7th (New Zealand, once).
So let's sum this up a bit.
Bangladesh, ranked 4th:
Has never played a team ranked 1-3 (i.e. never faced a team
ranked above them).
0-2 versus team ranked 5th (Pakistan)
0-1 versus team ranked 6th (Australia)
0-1 versus team ranked 7th (New Zealand)
1-1 versus team ranked 9th (West Indies)
3-0 versus team ranked 11th (Ireland)
And this gives them a ranking of 4th? I think that most
people would agree that it should give them a ranking of somewhere between
8th-10th!
It isn't just that they have never faced any teams who are
ranked ahead of them (at least not in the ranking period, in the past 3 years)
but they haven't beaten any teams ranked just a bit below them either. If they
were to legitimately be ranked 4th, they should at least be above the teams
ranked 5th-7th, you'd think.
Perhaps with a 1-1 record they are on par with West Indies.
So perhaps they should be ranked 9th. Or even 8th. But not 4th.
A 4-5 record also should mean that they are below parity.
They should be below the average team, under 100, or around about 9th or 10th.
Except that the ICC rankings formula encourages scores in
the last year ahead of scores from 2 years ago or 3 years ago. So Bangladesh
win 3-0 and these 3 results are given much greater rating than their results
from 2 years ago.
It is encouraging for Bangladesh to be ranked so highly but
I hardly think that it is deserved. When they can beat the top three teams,
then perhaps we can take this ranking more seriously.
No comments:
Post a Comment