Ranking CW's top test cricketers by Career ICC Rating Average

[mr_mister]

Herb Sutcliffe when looking at stats alone is such a beast and this shows that. Such an anomaly he's so far back in the discussion of ATG batsmen. If he had any other opening partner...

 

[Bolo.]

Shaun Pollock always shines through when you look at numbers like that.

Obviously rating takes account tye amount of matches played, but not relative percentages. A very good or very bad few matches against a particular opponet doesn't make much difference to the rating. Average ICC rating is possibly the best possible single rating available (Excuse me DoG) currently.

I think the ICC rankings are good, and that Pollock ranks higher in pretty much every stat based analysis than a more subjective one for good reason, but how high he is here shows some issues with the ranking system.

Average points heavily favour those who hit their stride fast. Reverse Pollocks career and his average points would be much lower. There isn't an inherent reason to believe the player who starts faster is better... while a number of us are inclined to forgive late career slumps in favour of peaks, a lot of players debut too early to reflect well on overall records. Whether we favour peaks or entire career, we shouldnt favour early career peaks ahead of late ones. Pollock got good early career.

Im a bigger fan of consistency than most, but average rankings favour consistency too much, particularly at the top levels. If a bat averages 0 for 50 tests and 5000 for the next 50, they are clearly the best bat ever, but will end with a sub 500 average ranking, and be considered crap by ICC rankings.

These are just problems with the way they calculate average ranking. Date specific rankings that averages are based on have other problems, but this post is long enough.

Anyway, on the bright side, Lillee>Siddle according to the ICC. Stats based rankings are always going to throw up some oddities that we subjectively disagree with, like Pollock here, or Siddle/Lillee, in what on paper seems the best put together stats analysis I have seen.

ICC average rating might be the best stats system we have (I seriously doubt this, despite respecting it), but even if it is, it has its flaws.

 

[trundler]

I think the ICC rankings are good, and that Pollock ranks higher in pretty much every stat based analysis than a more subjective one for good reason, but how high he is here shows some issues with the ranking system.

Average points heavily favour those who hit their stride fast. Reverse Pollocks career and his average points would be much lower. There isn't an inherent reason to believe the player who starts faster is better... while a number of us are inclined to forgive late career slumps in favour of peaks, a lot of players debut too early to reflect well on overall records. Whether we favour peaks or entire career, we shouldnt favour early career peaks ahead of late ones. Pollock got good early career.

Im a bigger fan of consistency than most, but average rankings favour consistency too much, particularly at the top levels. If a bat averages 0 for 50 tests and 5000 for the next 50, they are clearly the best bat ever, but will end with a sub 500 average ranking, and be considered crap by ICC rankings.

These are just problems with the way they calculate average ranking. Date specific rankings that averages are based on have other problems, but this post is long enough.

Anyway, on the bright side, Lillee>Siddle according to the ICC. Stats based rankings are always going to throw up some oddities that we subjectively disagree with, like Pollock here, or Siddle/Lillee, in what on paper seems the best put together stats analysis I have seen.

ICC average rating might be the best stats system we have (I seriously doubt this, despite respecting it), but even if it is, it has its flaws.

There's something bizarre going on with peaking early, yes. Root's 2016 run has a higher peak rating than his current century every other match run and Marnus was #1 for ages despite being vastly inferior to Root for about a year.

 

[shortpitched713]

I think the ICC rankings are good, and that Pollock ranks higher in pretty much every stat based analysis than a more subjective one for good reason, but how high he is here shows some issues with the ranking system.

Average points heavily favour those who hit their stride fast. Reverse Pollocks career and his average points would be much lower. There isn't an inherent reason to believe the player who starts faster is better... while a number of us are inclined to forgive late career slumps in favour of peaks, a lot of players debut too early to reflect well on overall records. Whether we favour peaks or entire career, we shouldnt favour early career peaks ahead of late ones. Pollock got good early career.

Im a bigger fan of consistency than most, but average rankings favour consistency too much, particularly at the top levels. If a bat averages 0 for 50 tests and 5000 for the next 50, they are clearly the best bat ever, but will end with a sub 500 average ranking, and be considered crap by ICC rankings.

These are just problems with the way they calculate average ranking. Date specific rankings that averages are based on have other problems, but this post is long enough.

Anyway, on the bright side, Lillee>Siddle according to the ICC. Stats based rankings are always going to throw up some oddities that we subjectively disagree with, like Pollock here, or Siddle/Lillee, in what on paper seems the best put together stats analysis I have seen.

ICC average rating might be the best stats system we have (I seriously doubt this, despite respecting it), but even if it is, it has its flaws.

So the way it's described on the ICC Rankings website, it seems like you only get a percentage of your points, for your earliest matches. So if anything that should favor players who did not immediately reach their peak, because they would experience a lesser magnitude of the "penalty" in those early matches, right?

 

[Bolo.]

So the way it's described on the ICC Rankings website, it seems like you only get a percentage of your points, for your earliest matches. So if anything that should favor players who did not immediately reach their peak, because they would experience a lesser magnitude of the "penalty" in those early matches, right?

Kinda. I think the number of games for full points is 20 in modern cricket. Been years since I looked at it. But your ranking swings a lot, even accounting for adjustment.

Simple example, Rowe double tonned in his first game and ended it on 447 ICC points. If he made a pair the next game his rating would have dropped to (I really have no idea... hypothetically 353ish), giving him an average rating of 400. If he had paired his 1st game, he would have ended with a zero rating, and then doubled tonned in his next game he would have ended on (again, no idea, but say 350), giving him an average rating of 175. He is equally good either way, but it's a massive points difference.

Obviously the average point swings become less pronounced the longer a career goes on for, but the priciple holds.

 

[shortpitched713]

Kinda. I think the number of games for full points is 20 in modern cricket. Been years since I looked at it. But your ranking swings a lot, even accounting for adjustment.

Simple example, Rowe double tonned in his first game and ended it on 447 ICC points. If he made a pair the next game his rating would have dropped to (I really have no idea... hypothetically 353ish), giving him an average rating of 400. If he had paired his 1st game, he would have ended with a zero rating, and then doubled tonned in his next game he would have ended on (again, no idea, but say 350), giving him an average rating of 175. He is equally good either way, but it's a massive points difference.

Obviously the average point swings become less pronounced the longer a career goes on for, but the priciple holds.

I get what you're saying, and that sort of order effect would make a bigger effect on shorter careers I would think. For longer careers, I don't think the order makes as big of a difference, as I saw both players who started well, and others that built up to their best performance both end up with high rating averages.

I think the end result of all of this is that extremely consistent players, end up not being penalized by this effect. Start good, continue playing good, and retire as soon as your form drops in the slightest, lol.

 

[Bolo.]

I get what you're saying, and that sort of order effect would make a bigger effect on shorter careers I would think. For longer careers, I don't think the order makes as big of a difference, as I saw both players who started well, and others that built up to their best performance both end up with high rating averages.

I think the end result of all of this is that extremely consistent players, end up not being penalized by this effect. Start good, continue playing good, and retire as soon as your form drops in the slightest, lol.

For sure. Affect on long careers is a lot less. Mcgrath @ number 1 (briefly) started slow, but played so enough matches that it didn't impact him so much.

Margins are thin at the top though. Pollock would definitely drop X places if this was taken into account.

From the list, Waugh is probably a better example of how being bad early smashes your rating. His average rating is crazy low without having an excuse like G Pollock of a short career. There are other ICC methodologies that hit his ranking (reasonable and otherwise... I think, we don't know exactly how it's calculated), but I think he is taking too much of a knock from average rating.

 

[shortpitched713]

There are other ICC methodologies that hit his ranking (reasonable and otherwise... I think, we don't know exactly how it's calculated), but I think he is taking too much of a knock from average rating.

Now I damn sure don't work for the ICC, and I'd love to know the exact formula and weights used for the calculation, but alas that is no doubt proprietary because I couldn't find it online anywhere.

However, the factors used are elaborated here https://www.relianceiccrankings.com/about.php , and I don't find myself having any argument with any of them. Runs/wickets, level of opposition, overall runs scored in the match, and match result. These are all pretty objective and valuable criteria, imho. We could quibble with the weighting of each factor, if such were made available to us, but alas it is not as far as I'm aware.

 

[Bolo.]

Now I damn sure don't work for the ICC, and I'd love to know the exact formula and weights used for the calculation, but alas that is no doubt proprietary because I couldn't find it online anywhere.

However, the factors used are elaborated here https://www.relianceiccrankings.com/about.php , and I don't find myself having any argument with any of them. Runs/wickets, level of opposition, overall runs scored in the match, and match result. These are all pretty objective and valuable criteria, imho. We could quibble with the weighting of each factor, if such were made available to us, but alas it is not as far as I'm aware.

It isn't, and for good reason. Fanboys and nerds would raise hell if it was available regardless of how good it is, and it would generally be regarded as less legitimate if people knew how it worked.

However they draw the results, it is a good system. But it has flaws for sure, like any stats based system. For example, they tweaked it for the the 1% rating drop for missed games in recent years, but didn't apply it retrospectively (they can never do this), so parallel systems exist for newer and older players.

My quibbles with the system are pretty minor (partially because I think it produces good date-specific rankings, and partially because I don't know enough about it to unleash full nerd on it).

But some of the issues I think I have do seem to benefit Pollock the bowler (he gets knocked as a bat/AR), and I think he is overrated by the date-specific rankings in addition to definitely being overrated by the averaging concept.

 

[Days of Grace]

What is considered to be “greatness”? Is it 800? I’d be interested to know how long, both in terms of time and matches, the top players managed to retain a rating above 800.

 

[shortpitched713]

What is considered to be “greatness”? Is it 800? I’d be interested to know how long, both in terms of time and matches, the top players managed to retain a rating above 800.

It's arbitrary where you want to draw the cutoff for that. From what I've seen, if you're over 850, you're in the top 1-3 batsmen or bowlers in the world. Only 33 batsmen and 25 bowlers have ever achieved a test rating of 900 or over.

So, obviously given that most players are unable to maintain that over a career, the highest rating averages are in the upper 700s, all achieved only by the most consistently excellent players (Bradman comes in at 855, the gun).

If you had any extended poor spots in your career (Steve Waugh's slow batting start, Tendulkar's 2006-2010), it absolutely hammers you in the rating average.

 

[jaideep]

What is the average ranking points Kohli,Root and Williamson?

 

[shortpitched713]

What is the average ranking points Kohli,Root and Williamson?

You can find this out for yourself. I've laid out the methodology in the below post.

If anyone wants to try and continue this for the rest of the batsmen/bowlers in CW's top 50/40 etc, or even just a selected player of interest, please be my guest. Not feeling it at the moment, as I doubt I'll have that incredible chunk of time I happened to have before. The method was really simple.

Don Bradman ICC Test Batting Ranking

ICC Player Rankings

www.relianceiccrankings.com

View attachment 32030
View attachment 32031

Above example for Don Bradman. I went to his ICC ranking test batting page. Then I just hovered over each point in the chart, and recorded it in an Excel sheet, which included a formula for the cumulative average of the values.

Obviously, if someone knows how to scrape these values directly from the site data, that would make the process a whole lot simpler and less time consuming, but I didn't find any spot in the developer tools view of the page where the data resides. It seems the data is somehow fed to the javascript <canvas> element that makes up that chart, but I couldn't find it.

Do keep in mind that for currently active players, there can often be a drop off in their career (and more rarely a rise) before they retire, so it's hard for me to say it's exactly a fair comparison between active and retired players, this is especially true for seam bowlers who have a strong tendency to decline before retirement, and less applicable for batsmen who sometimes go up and sometimes down towards the end of their careers. Spin bowlers end up being somewhere between the seam bowlers and batsmen.

 

[Nintendo]

There's something bizarre going on with peaking early, yes. Root's 2016 run has a higher peak rating than his current century every other match run and Marnus was #1 for ages despite being vastly inferior to Root for about a year.

Yeah that was always weird. Root was scoring runs for fun against india who were the #1 team with a few bowlers in the #10 (ashwin wasn't playing and I think he was #2 at the time) while marnus wasn't playing and root barely ever overtook him.

 

[shortpitched713]

I've made up a larger list of 107 bats, 75 pace, 39 spin, and 25 all-rounders (from DoG's lists, and ICC rating peak list) that I'm interesting in complete rating calculations for. The purpose of this project isn't to be some sort of definitive "best ever" list (no one will ever agree on that), but rather to serve as a reference for cricket fans as to what an ICC rating measure (something people are familiar with in judging contemporary players) comparison of historically important players over time looks like.

However, it's a fair bit of time intensive work, so I'm trying to gauge if anyone else would be willing to chip in. I would not be able to complete this by myself in a reasonable timeframe, so would have to abandon attempting it, if there's not adequate interest.

I've asked before if anyone is interested in helping, but I figure I'd facilitate that with a google doc, so here is the link for that so others can see what I've done, and what there is that's left:

ICC Career Rating Average

Bats D Brad,J Hobb,G Sobe,S Tend,V Rich,B Lara,L Hutt,W Hamm,S Gava,S Smit,G Head,H Sutc,G Chap,R Pont,G Poll,K Sang,A Bord,J Kall,S Waug 855.3653846,799,780.8494624,731.86,762.7355372,783.5496183,781.278481,745.4,736.528,801.7472527,711.7727273,775.4814815,712.8735632,736.8571429,589.1304348,76...

docs.google.com

It took me about 15 minutes to do an average player (80-90 matches played), but could go faster or slower depending on typing speed.
If you do want to start working on calculating some of these players, please send a forum PM/conversation message to me, and I'll send an edit link for it as well.

And the website where you can find these historic ICC ranting charts again, for reference:

ICC Test Batting Rankings : Top 100 Rated Test Batsmen

ICC Player Rankings

www.relianceiccrankings.com

 

[shortpitched713]

I've gone ahead and finished out this project. I've included the top 57 batsmen, top 32 pacers, top 10 spinners, and top 13 all-rounders. There are a bunch of other players I've compiled averages for, but their rating is too low to make the list. You can ask me, and I might have it though. As before, currently active players are italicized.

Batsmen:

ICC Rank	Name	Rat Avg
1	Don Bradman	855.4
2	Steve Smith	801.7
3	Jack Hobbs	799.0
4	Joe Root	789.1
5	Brian Lara	783.5
6	Len Hutton	781.3
7	Garry Sobers	780.8
8	Neil Harvey	777.7
9	Herbert Sutcliffe	775.5
10	Kumar Sangakkara	763.3
11	Viv Richards	762.7
12	Everton Weekes	760.5
13	Peter May	760.3
14	Ken Barrington	747.2
15	Wally Hammond	745.4
16	Javed Miandad	743.1
17	Marnus Labuschagne	742.6
18	Rahul Dravid	741.8
19	Virat Kohli	738.6
20	Michael Hussey	738.5
21	Ricky Ponting	736.9
22	Sunil Gavaskar	736.5
23	Alan Border	736.0
24	Jacques Kallis	734.6
25	Sachin Tendulkar	731.9
26	Kevin Pietersen	730.8
27	Cheteshwar Pujara	728.8
28	Kane Williamson	728.0
29	Michael Clarke	726.4
30	Matthew Hayden	723.3
31	Adam Gilchrist	722.0
32	Bill Lawry	715.4
33	Colin Cowdrey	713.4
34	Greg Chappell	712.9
35	Denis Compton	712.6
36	George Headley	711.8
37	David Warner	711.4
38	Younis Khan	710.1
39	Shivnarine Chanderpaul	709.2
40	Mahela Jayawardene	705.2
41	Virender Sehwag	703.9
42	Hashim Amla	701.3
43	Colin McDonald	701.0
44	AB de Villiers	700.2
45	Doug Walters	698.9
46	Inzamam-ul-Haq	697.6
47	Alistair Cook	696.8
48	Graeme Smith	696.0
49	Dudley Nourse	695.7
50	David Gower	688.8
51	Rohan Kanhai	688.6
52	Richie Richardson	686.2
53	Gundappa Viswanath	686.1
54	Gordon Greenidge	681.9
55	Mohammad Yousuf	681.2
56	Arthur Morris	680.6
57	Ross Taylor	678.4

Pace Bowlers:

ICC Rank	Name	Rat Avg
1	Glenn Mcgrath	790.9
2	Vernon Philander	778.8
3	Curtly Ambrose	777.2
4	Dale Steyn	775.3
5	Shaun Pollock	775.3
6	Allan Donald	771.1
7	Joel Garner	768.7
8	Pat Cummins	750.4
9	Wes Hall	747.8
10	Malcolm Marshall	740.9
11	Ray Lindwall	740.0
12	Dennis Lillee	737.1
13	Bill Johnston	736.5
14	Fred Trueman	734.4
15	Kagiso Rabada	734.3
16	Richard Hadlee	730.9
17	James Anderson	721.3
18	Imran Khan	710.1
19	Stuart Clark	709.8
20	Waqar Younis	709.3
21	Colin Croft	700.4
22	Courtney Walsh	697.8
23	Alec Bedser	696.1
24	Wasim Akram	694.3
25	Ian Botham	686.8
26	Andy Roberts	684.8
27	Stuart Broad	684.2
28	Mitchell Johnson	680.5
29	Keith Miller	677.9
30	Ian Bishop	676.7
31	Peter Pollock	675.6
32	Michael Holding	673.8

Spin Bowlers:

ICC Rank	Name	Rat Avg
1	Muttiah Muralitharan	770.1
2	Ravichandran Ashwin	765.0
3	Shane Warne	726.8
4	Sydney Barnes	715.1
5	Anil Kumble	714.2
6	Bill O'Reilly	712.0
7	Clarrie Grimmett	711.3
8	Lance Gibbs	710.2
9	Ravindra Jadeja	708.4
10	Derek Underwood	679.2

All-Rounders:

ICC Rank	Name	Rat Avg
1	Ian Botham	414.6
2	Jacques Kallis	405.7
3	Garry Sobers	399.5
4	Keith Miller	391.1
5	Shaun Pollock	367.3
6	Tony Greig	356.1
7	Imran Khan	345.9
8	Ravichandran Ashwin	341.4
9	Richard Hadlee	330.8
10	Trevor Goddard	324.3
11	Kapil Dev	317.2
12	Shakib al Hasan	310.8
13	Ravindra Jadeja	308.6

 

[Coronis]

I always thought Tendulkar was extremely overrated and Root extremely underrated.

 

[CricAddict]

I always thought Tendulkar was extremely overrated and Root extremely underrated.

And that Philander is the second best pacer of all-time?

 

[Coronis]

And that Philander is the second best pacer of all-time?

Big Vern was the second best pacer of all time. He is judged harshly for not conforming to societies expectations of beauty from a sportsperson. So sad.

 

[Migara]

This gives an idea of how consistent were these players, one of the most important metrics.