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International Cricket Council (ICC) announced the world cricket ranking system in October 2002. Over the years, there has been lots of +ive/-ive debate about the criteria, ICC follows, but more or less, ICC rankings have remained widely recognized and respected as compared to other rankings in cricket.

ICC gives rankings both to countries and individual cricket players. Rankings given to teams depend on two factors. The first factor is the performance of the team in the field and the second factor is the strength of the opposing team. This means that if any team wins against a strong opposition like Australia or South Africa, their ranking can rise dramatically but if the victory is against a low ranked team like Zimbabwe or Kenya, then there may be very little change in the rankings.

Individual Players are ranked on a scale of 0 points to 1000 points. ICC cricket rankings takes in to consideration the past performance of a player for any given rankings. So even if a player is not playing in the international cricket for a long time due to injury or any other reason, he can still maintain his ranking at the top ten based on his previous exceptional performances. This issue has remained a point of great contention even within the corridors of ICC.

The ODI rankings of teams were started by the ICC on August 01, 2003, and are based on results of all ODI’s played since then. This ICC method is used for rankings of 10 Test playing countries and Kenya, which has only the ODI status. The current cricket ratings of teams are based on three years of results.

Australia remained at the top since the inception of ranking system up till the 2nd One Day International (ODI) of Chappell-Hadlee Trophy at Auckland, when New Zealand chased down their mammoth target of 337 in a style. Due to this famous defeat of world champions, South Africa now tops the chart, courtesy to Pakistan.

Current One-day rankings

1. South Africa 128 points
2. Australia 126
3. Pakistan 111
4. New Zealand 111
5. India 109
6. Sri Lanka 108
7. England 106
8. West Indies 101
9. Bangladesh 42
10. Zimbabwe 22
11. Kenya 0

Cricket is surely a funny old game, and the word of caution is that rankings could be deceiving like looks.

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