Spark
Global Moderator
So I was browsing arXiv, looking at recent uploads (as I do) when I stumbled upon this: "Identifying the greatest team and captain - A complex network approach to cricket matches"
Tests:
It's 1am and I'm currently lying in bed with a laptop so I can't exactly read the paper thoroughly, but the historical rankings are:We consider all Test matches played between 1877 and 2010 and One Day International (ODI) matches played between 1971 and 2010. We form directed and weighted networks of teams and also of their captains. The success of a team (or captain) is determined by the 'quality' of wins and not on the number of wins alone. We apply the diffusion based PageRank algorithm on the networks to access the importance of wins and rank the teams and captains respectively. Our analysis identifies {\it Australia} as the best team in both forms of cricket $-$ Test and ODI. {\it Steve Waugh} is identified as the best captain in Test cricket and {\it Ricky Ponting} is the best captain in the ODI format. We also compare our ranking scheme with the existing ranking schemes which include the Reliance ICC Ranking. Our method does not depend on `external' criteria in ranking of teams (captains). The purpose of this paper is to introduce a revised ranking of cricket teams and to quantify the success of the captains.
Tests:
ODIsAustralia
South Africa
England
West Indies
Pakistan
India
Sri Lanka
New Zealand
Zimbabwe
Bangladesh
And for Test captains:Australia
South Africa
West Indies
England
Pakistan
India
New Zealand
Sri Lanka
Zimbabwe
Bangladesh
ODI captains:Steve Waugh
Graeme Smith
Ricky Ponting
Greg Chappell
Richie Benaud
Clive Lloyd
Ian Chappel
Allan Border
M. S. Dhoni
Nasser Hussain
Peter May
Bill Woodfull
Sir Vivian Richards
Sir Frank Worell
Sourav Ganguly
Kim Hughes
Ray Illingworth
Geoff Howarth
Andrew Strauss
Stephen Fleming
There's also an era-by-era list of rankings which I cbf copying. Again, not sure of the methodology, seems to be some version of Google's PageRank. And obviously this is brand new on arXiv and as such might not yet be published anywhere, but interesting nonethelessRicky Ponting
Graeme Smith
Imran Khan
Hansie Cronje
Arjuna Ranatunga
Stephen Fleming
Clive Lloyd
M. S. Dhoni
Sir Vivian Richards
Kapil Dev
Allan Border
Mahela Jayawardene
Brian Lara
Daniel Vettori
Paul Collingwood
Sourav Ganguly
Mohammad Azharuddin
Rahul Dravid
Javed Miandad
Wasim Akram