This is Part 1 of a five-part series in the lead-up to the first Test between Pakistan and West Indies in the UAE, starting on Thursday, looking at the rise of the Pakistani Test team.
When Misbah-ul-Haq accepted the Test mace from David Richardson, the ICC chief executive, last month, the captain said it was “ironic” No 1 status had been earned while Pakistan are in exile.
It is more than just ironic. Given Pakistan have not played Test cricket at home since March 2009, their achievement seems logically, practically and mathematically remarkable – more or less impossible, even.
Every series Pakistan play is overseas. While opposition players at least have an even spread of touring and time spent at home, Pakistan’s are always on the road.
And yet UAE has become the most impenetrable stronghold for them. They have never lost a full series here. It is now, as Steve Waugh once said about India, the “final frontier” for touring teams.
• PART 2: In UAE, an existential longing for home
• PART 3: Ajmal, Azhar and Wahab's favourite UAE moments
• PART 4: The secret to Pakistan's UAE success
• PART 5: Misbah-ul-Haq, a record that does not skip
India leapfrogged Pakistan at the start of this month with a widely forecast home win over New Zealand. But if the limited-overs series against the West Indies is anything to judge by, it feels only a matter of time before Pakistan vault back to the top of the standings.
Ahead of the first of the three Test matches, the day-night match at Dubai International Stadium starting on Thursday, we will be assessing how Pakistan have turned the UAE into Fortress Pakistan.
In Part 1, we look at the maths behind their rise, and speak to the London-based actuary who created and maintains Test cricket’s rankings system.
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Put in basic terms, the rankings are a mathematical system based on assigning points to teams for every Test match played, averaged out over all Tests played by the team between a three to four year period.
Points are awarded depending on the strength of the opposition. A bonus point is earned for a series win. Perhaps most pertinently in relation to Pakistan’s rise, though, no extra points are allocated for away successes.
According to David Kendix, the man who devised and maintains the rankings, reaching the top without playing at home is “highly impressive”.
“The model does not reflect Pakistan’s inability to host Tests in their own country,” Kendix said. “Reaching No 1 under these circumstances is of course a highly impressive achievement, but not one that has earned them any extra points.
“It is certainly true that the proportion of home wins to away wins in Test cricket is at an all-time high. There are many factors that could explain this, but so long as most teams continue to play a broadly even mix of home and away Tests over a three to four year period, the model will remain appropriate.
“If we were ever to get to the stage where, whether for financial or other reasons, a number of teams tended only to host Tests, then this feature of the model would be looked at afresh.”
In order to reflect the fact some teams play more Tests than others, and that some play stronger sides more often, Kendix created a system that borrowed from chess.
“For a model to be credible it had to adjust automatically for both of these factors,” he said. “The variation in number of matches was reflected through using a rating that was like a batting average, so it reflected average performance across however many matches are played.
“To reflect opposition strength was more tricky. I adopted a mathematical formula used previously in chess which provides a greater reward the higher your opponent’s rating is relative to your own.”
Maintaining the rankings, Kendix says, is low maintenance, with the only time-consuming work being the annual update – when the oldest year of results is removed and the weightings of more recent fixtures changed – plus fielding media queries. In its 13 years in operation, the Test model has remained virtually unchanged.
“That’s not to say the model has not been subject to criticism,” he said. “But such criticism has normally related to which factors are allowed for and which are ignored, never to the underlying mathematical robustness.
“If someone thinks the model should be designed in a different way, that’s fine. There is no single correct version; people will always have different views. What matters is the design meets the criteria as agreed with the ICC.”
Kendix asked ICC a variety of questions, such as whether the rating should reflect margin of victory in a match or just the result, whether a series result matter as well as that of each Test, and if away wins should count for more, before settling on the formula.
“Like an architect agreeing with a client what they want their building to look like, I built the model according to a jointly agreed specification,” he says.
“That’s why, if someone says the model should allow for X but not Y, I will say ‘Yes, it could have been built that way, but ICC have chosen something different. If they change their mind, I will gladly update the model.’
“The other sort of criticism comes from supporters who believe their team’s ranking is too low - curiously, never too high.
“This is to be expected and, to the extent that it shows the rankings are of interest and being noticed, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. If no-one talked about the rankings at all, then they will have failed in their primary objective.”
pradley@thenational.ae
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