Rediff cricket rankings

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The Rediff Cricket Rankings is a system for ranking international cricket teams devised by MJ Manohar Rao of the University of Mumbai and Srinivas Bhogle of the Indian 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).

1 How ratings are calculated
2 Noteworthy points
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] How ratings are calculated

Rao & Bhogle start by creating a matrix of results for nine international cricket teams (Australia, 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 proportion to the inverse variances of the two indices.

[edit] Noteworthy points

Bangladesh is the only test cricket nation not 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. 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 also excluded from the ODI ratings.