Tuesday, April 27, 2010

All About Twenty20 Cricket Ranking

Twenty20 is the new craze in cricket. This shortest version of the game has added significant amount of spice to cricket and it is now considered to be the most exciting and entertaining format of cricket. The third edition of T20 world cup would get underway from 30 April in West Indies. IPL 2010 has just finished and people are now eagerly waiting for another exciting twenty20 tournament. They are looking to see batsmen hitting the ball around the field, and bowlers as well as fielders trying to keep the ball inside the boundary. The previous two twenty20 world cup tournaments were very successful as bat-ball war provided immense excitement to the cricket fans around the world.

There are many who even see the future of cricket in T20, believing that it would take the game beyond its traditional boundaries. So, there is a possibility that cricket’s international market would expand due to T20 format. On the other hand, there are people who believe that T20 could decrease the quality of world cricket. They think that twenty20 is nothing but picnic cricket which people can enjoy for few days, but can tolerate it for a long time. Moreover, too much reliance on twenty20 could put a bad effect on test cricket which is definitely the breeding ground of cricket. A cricketer can develop his skill and temperament only playing longer version of the game, and without test cricket, you can not even expect quality cricketers would be coming out.

Well, no body can overlook or deny the growing popularity of twenty20 cricket, but at the same time, you can not forget test cricket. So, there should be a balance between the two. Test cricket is needed for developing cricketers, while twenty20 is necessary for giving entertainment to the fans and generating money for the cricketers. ICC should consider it seriously and make its future plans accordingly.

ICC must act smartly if it wants to develop cricket. I can see that the cricket’s governing body is slightly overlooking twenty20 cricket to some extent. It has been almost 5 years twenty20 has been one of the formats of international cricket. Still, I do not see any individual team ranking for twenty20 cricket and ICC also restricted the number of twenty20 games each team would play over the year. I was really surprised to know that there is no official ICC ranking for twenty20 cricket which is now the most popular version of the game. In fact, people are also interested to know about twenty20 ranking. Today, I saw in google trend India that fans are searching by the keyword icc t20 rankings.

Here, I am giving a twenty20 ranking (though I am not sure if it should be called ranking) of the test playing countries in terms of their winning percentage from cricinfo:

Team

Matches

Win

Loss

No result/

Tie

Winning Percentage

Pakistan

30

22

7

1

75%

South

Africa

26

17

9

0

65.38%

Sri Lanka

25

15

10

0

60%

Australia

29

15

12

2

55.35%

India

20

10

8

2

55.26%

New Zealand

33

13

17

3

43.93%

Zimbabwe

8

3

4

1

43.75

West Indies

21

8

11

2

42.85%

England

25

10

14

1

41.66%

Bangladesh

14

3

11

0

21.42%

Well, there is no doubt, the list given above based on the winning percentage of all time does not reflect the recent form of the teams. So, in the strict sense, it is better not to consider it as ranking.

I already mentioned that I did not find any twenty20 ranking in the team ranking page of ICC website. However, I got a twenty20 ranking in cricketworld4u and from there I am here giving the ranking of the first 5 places:

Ranking

Team

Rating

1

Pakistan

101

2

Sri Lanka

94

3

South Africa

93

4

England

88

5

India

87

For rest of the ranking, visit cricketworld4u website. There is another site where I have got twenty20 ranking. If you want to get it, then click here.

Well, it is really very disappointing that ICC could not yet create any official ranking for twenty20 format, even though this is the most popular version of the game. ICC should also create ranking based on individual performance of the cricketers in twenty20 cricket like twenty20 ranking for the batsmen, twenty20 ranking for the bowlers and twenty20 ranking for the all rounders.

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