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The final ranking
Test Updates: |
May 16, 2002 India will stay seventhM J Manohar Rao and Srinivas BhogleIndia's performance in West Indies hasn't been good enough; they will stay seventh. This is very disappointing. Things looked very promising after the victory at Port of Spain in the second test. At that stage, another win and two draws would have taken India to the fifth place. But the defeat at Bridgetown completely messed up things. Now even if India win at Kingston (does that appear probable?), they'll stay seventh -- but the index will improve considerably. If India draw, even that's helpful (because West Indies still have an excellent home win ratio). If India lose, it's back to square one: India 2 points, WI 3 points -- which is how the scorecard looks like after the 1996-97 series in West Indies. It is perhaps time to accept the hard truth: that India only deserve to be seventh. It might help if we note that West Indies too are only good enough to be eighth -- that's why the two teams look so evenly matched. New Zealand, meanwhile, continue to ride their good luck. An interrupted series with a score line of 0-1, means that New Zealand will stay fourth. Pakistan looked good enough to wallop NZ 2-0 in that home series till the bomb blast blew up all their hopes. If Pakistan had also won the second test in the 2-test series, they would have climbed to the fourth place and NZ would have dropped to the fifth place, just ahead of Sri Lanka (as readers will recall, Pakistan is the only team that fares better "away" than at "home". Home wins are therefore much more valuable to Pakistan than, say, to Sri Lanka).
The current (as on May 16, 2002) home-away point tally of test playing teams is shown, below, in Table A.
The corresponding ranking table, Table F, appears below.
Note that the the India-West Indies series scorecard has still not been updated. We shall post that update after the fifth test, but Table G, below, lists the points tally for all the remaining possible scenarios in the series.
Finally, we take a look at the prospects of the 3-test series between England and Sri Lanka starting today. Without Muralitharan, at least in the first test, one doesn't see Sri Lanka winning that series. The most likely outcome would be a series win for England, either 2-0 or 1-0. The best that Sri Lanka could hope for is a drawn series. Since SL had won the one-off test at The Oval, this series will most probably see a drop in Sri Lanka's index (see Table H). If Sri Lanka lose the series horribly, and India manage to draw the fifth test, there is a slim chance that India will take the sixth place just ahead of Sri Lanka. But India really had no business to surrender the advantage that they had gained after the Port of Spain win.
M J Manohar Rao is professor and director, Department of Economics,
University of Mumbai, Mumbai; Srinivas Bhogle is scientist and head,
Information Management Division, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore.
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