World Test Championship : Performance by Team

[sam_ahm]

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.

[JHunter]

Fully agree with sam_ahm here, a very very interesting thread. Well written and well researched!

[Kriterion_BD]

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.

[Kriterion_BD]

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

South Africa vs TBD in the final!

[eugene]

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.

[Kriterion_BD]

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.

[Kriterion_BD]

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.

[eugene]

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

[Kriterion_BD]

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.