Virat Kohli achieved a new career-high ICC rating in T20Is this week, without having played a game in over a year. Ben Gardner explains how.
The ICC rankings update that put Virat Kohli out on his own
On Wednesday, Virat Kohli was celebrated for achieving a feat unique in cricket history, the first player, male or female, batter or bowler, to achieve a ratings peak of over 900 in all three formats in the ICC rankings. The wrinkle? Kohli hasn’t played a T20I, the last of the trio needed to complete the set, since retiring after winning the T20 World Cup more than a year ago. And his ratings peak of 909 was achieved more than a decade ago, after hitting 66 off 41 against an England side featuring James Tredwell and Harry Gurney.
For a man whose every move, sponsorship deal and social media like is immediately top-line news among any number of Indian media outlets, this was odd. There was no way we’d all missed Kohli going where no one else had gone before. And a scan through the archives revealed that, up until March this year, Kohli’s peak rating was a mere 897 points, still among the best of all time, but not breaching that mythical 900. So what’s happened?
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The man with the answers is Gordon Vince, who, all the way back in 1986, wrote a computer program which would form the basis of what have now become the ICC rankings. The program, effectively a cricket simulator, produced an extraordinarily believable scorecard in a fictional England-India Test match, so much so that Rob Eastaway, Vince’s friend, was moved to write a match report from said scorecard, and that The Cricketer magazine, after being sent the report, made it their lead feature.
A letter from Ted Dexter, former England Test captain soon arrived on Eastaway’s doormat, asking if he could run an idea past Eastaway. Over lunch, Dexter explained his vision for a system for evaluating Test cricketers, taking into account match context and the performances of others in each game. Soon after, between Vince, Eastaway and Dexter, the rankings were born.
Romania's Rebecca Blake, and the rankings' philosophical question
In the algorithm’s early days lie the seeds of Kohli’s recent rise, with their first forays requiring tweaks along the way to accurately reflect the game in front of them. Vince explains how standout debut showings from Narendra Hirwani and Brendon Kuruppu were given too great a weighting, each shooting into the higher reaches of the table after a solitary game. An adjustment was needed.
Now, after decades of honing, the Test rankings formula is robust enough to withstand outlier performances, such as the West Indies being bowled out for 27 in Sabina Park. But in T20Is, it’s a different story. T20 cricket is a format in which runs and wickets don’t equate to good performance in the same way. There is no such thing as a match-losing hundred in Tests, but there might be in T20s. Different roles come into play as well. A good set of numbers for an anchoring opener or No.3 is completely different to what a finisher should post.
Another challenge, and the most relevant in Kohli’s case, was the ICC’s move, as of January 1, 2019, to expand T20I status to all international teams. “The idea of status and rankings is to say to them that the results will count and the results will go towards improving your ranking,” Geoff Allardice, then the ICC’s general manager, said. The puzzle is, how much should they count?
In cricket, unlike, for example, football, not everyone plays everyone. Global tournament qualification is a pathway, but the higher you are up the pyramid, the further along the path your journey starts. The likes of Malta and Rwanda might never play an ICC full member. So when you get a player dominating at that level, but never showcasing what they do against the world’s best sides, how should they be rated?
Vince cites the example of Romania’s Rebecca Blake. Based on her numbers, she’s one of the greatest of all time, averaging over 100 from 13 T20Is, with two centuries and five fifties. She also averages 24 and concedes less than six an over with the ball for good measure. But her appearances came against Greece, the Isle of Man, Luxembourg, Serbia and Malta, not your traditional cricketing powerhouses. Clearly, she’s the best player among her regular rivals.
But whether that’s enough to push her into the upper reaches of the ICC rankings is as much a philosophical debate as anything: if the idea behind expanding T20I status was to encourage the growth of the game, should the algorithm prevent any players from rising too high?
What the rankings update really was
These are the kind of problems that require tweaks, and there have been several of these since the inception of the T20I rankings. Kohli’s peak rating jump was down to this, but also a full historical refresh of the all-time ICC rankings, based on the up-to-date algorithm, which happens much more rarely. While the ICC website is glossy, the actual rankings figures on there leave much to be desired, and are often changing with each site design update.
A separate website, run by Eastaway and Vince, is a glorious throwback in terms of web design, and an invaluable resource for any cricket nerd. It contains the same rankings available on the ICC site and much more besides. You can access date-specific rankings and all-time rankings, view player timelines for both rankings and ratings, the lot.
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It was on this site that a significant update took place in March, reevaluating all players as per the new formula, with jumps for Kohli and a whole host of other players – David Warner’s career peak jumped a whopping 68 points – and just the odd drop here and there, with Eoin Morgan and Ish Sodhi among those to lose a handful.
All of which means that Kohli’s new rating is no glitch: his 900-point peak in all three formats is official, and unmatched. And what of Blake? She’s there, joint 87th in the all time women’s T20I batting rankings, which account for everyone and everything, thanks to Dexter, Eastaway and Vince.
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