The inaugural World Test Championship is well under way, with both India and Australia emerging as the early favourites. The tournament’s stated aim was to bring more context to Test match cricket by introducing an equivalent to the World Cups held in the shorter formats of the game. It’s far too early to make a judgment on the tournament’s success, but the concept and structure of the tournament itself has already thrown up a few interesting talking points.
The format in particular has been the subject of much debate. The ICC have essentially applied a points system to fit around the existing test schedule to avoid disrupting any pre-arranged series – the points system is designed to give each team has a fair chance despite some notable differences in the respective fixture schedules.
We’ll go into a discussion around what these differences are, and their various implications shortly in this article, but it’s worth noting at this point that some have gone as far as to deride the whole competition as an unjust farce and almost entirely unloved. Whether those things are true is largely a matter of opinion, but at the centre of these arguments is a key point that we will come back to throughout this article:
Will the best team actually win the World Test Championship?
Before delving into the specifics of why this might or might not happen, it’s worth briefly reflecting on whether this necessarily needs to be the case. We already have a measure for the world’s best team with the ICC Rankings, so this can be seen as a race to become World Test Champion alongside that. I would agree that a good sporting competition should see the best team come out as winners most of the time – but it’s also important that there is some scope for an unfancied team to have a chance if they get a bit of luck along the way.
We will attempt to answer the key question on whether the best team will win in analytical terms later on in this article, but firstly we need to outline the reasons as to why the tournament is seen by some as unfair. There are a few factors, all relating to the format and scoring system, and we’ll discuss each in turn.
Luck of the Draw
This is not a typical round-robin tournament in which every team plays each other once. Instead, each team will only compete against six of their potential opponents. This of course leads to an imbalanced fixture schedule, with some teams perceived to have an easier set of fixtures than others. Sri Lanka, for example, arguably have the easiest set of fixtures, given that they have to play neither of the current frontrunners, Australia or India. Conversely, Australia are denied what would seem relatively easy fixtures against West Indies and the aforementioned Sri Lanka.
A favourable draw is by no means any guarantee of success – just ask Gareth Southgate. Teams will still have to perform at a consistently high standard to finish in the top 2 regardless of their opposition, but it is worth examining to what extent your chances could be boosted with an easier schedule.
It’s also worth noting that a ‘fair’ round robin system in which everyone plays each other once or twice can still unintentionally lead to some imbalanced situations – this is particularly prevalent as you approach the latter stages of said round-robin, where some teams may no longer have anything to play for and so opponents of that team arguably have an advantage.
Not all Tests are created equal
Possibly the most contentious aspect of the World Test Championship is its scoring system, which is effectively a workaround for the fact that the series being played vary in length from 2 to 5 tests. Each series has the same number of points available (120), and these points are divided equally throughout the matches in that series. This means that winning a test in a two-match series is worth over double the amount of points than a win in a five match series (60 vs 24).
In theory, this all balances itself out since each team plays the same amount of series, and therefore has the same amount of points available over the tournament, but it can be somewhat jarring to see major differences in the points awarded for individual tests.
The consensus on this seems to be that it favours teams playing shorter series, but that assertion is somewhat contentious at the very least. Winning a game in a two-match series is obviously a significant boost, but equally a defeat can be very damaging. All this does is simply raise the stakes for the individual tests in shorter series.
Consider a series where one team is solid, but not overwhelming favourites. Over the course of a 5 match series you’d expect their quality to show and take the series. A whitewash is unlikely but you’d expect them to come out with somewhere between 80 and 100 points. In a two-match series there’s a greater chance they could come out with the maximum 120 points, but equally they know if they put one foot wrong they could end up with just 60 points. Similarly, would the weaker team risk a probable 20 to 40 points from a five-match series for a shot at 60 points in a 2 match series?
It’s not clear by any means where the advantage lies, and it’s likely that any given team’s preference will be based on their overall quality. Possibly weaker teams might prefer shorter series as they boost the value of any unlikely wins they manage to get, but as noted in the previous section, the only way to qualify for the final is to perform at a consistently high standard, regardless of the number of games you have to play.
Bringing it home
As a consequence of the differing lengths of each series, we also end up with a fixture schedule which sees teams playing more tests either at home or away. India, for example, will play 10 games at home but just 8 away from home. West Indies, on the other hand, have just 6 home matches, and 9 away. Each team does, however, play 3 series both home and away, meaning there is an even split for the points available home or away for every team.
Similarly to what was outlined in the above section, there isn’t necessarily a clear advantage either way. Do you want shorter series at home, boosting your chances of taking maximum points from those series but risk major points lost from any defeat, or shorter series away from home, enhancing the value of any away scalps you claim but risk being whitewashed and coming home with nul points?
As we can see, there are a number of contentious aspects to the World Test Championship, but it is difficult to assert either way how influential these may be in terms of the final standings.
It's also worth noting that the criticisms of the tournament are not limited to the format and scoring systems. There are other, more general criticisms, such as several test series not counting towards the championship, as well as the total exclusion of smaller test playing nations such as Ireland and Afghanistan.
These are separate debates, however, so we’ll go back to trying to answer the question we posed earlier – will the best team win? Given that the final will be contested by the two teams who earn the most points in the tournament, however, we more specifically want to answer the question:
Will the final be contested by the two best teams?
To test this, we’ll look at a hypothetical set of World Test Championship results, posted by Reddit user LifeMankadsMe. He has looked at the fixtures for the current tournament and pulled the result from the last time each of those series was played. He then computed the points as they would have been given under the current points system, giving the following standings:
From that, we can see that India would play New Zealand in the final of this hypothetical championship. Intuitively this feels appropriate, not least since at the time of writing these are the two teams occupying the top two spots in the ICC World Test Rankings, but given the greatly differing set of matches that went into calculating the table versus what goes into the ICC Rankings, this isn’t conclusive evidence of a fair outcome.
The best way to test this is to come up with alternative methods of ranking the teams using the same set of matches and seeing if we get the same results.
A simple method to do this is to apply a traditional points system to the results – here we have gone with 4 for a win, and 2 for a draw. Since the teams have played a different number of matches, these points have been standardised to a ‘points per game’ figure, which is then multiplied through by 17 – which is the average number of games played by each team:
Once again we see India and New Zealand occupying the top two spots, which bodes well for the WTC system. In fact, the only change in the standings is England leapfrogging Sri Lanka into third, which isn’t especially surprising given how close they were with the WTC scoring system.
Whilst this does indicate that the WTC scoring system is probably fairer than it may seem at first glance, it still doesn’t account for some of the more contentious aspects we identified earlier – in particular the uneven fixture schedule and the potential to play more games either at home or away.
For that we have the Bradley-Terry model, which is used extensively elsewhere on the site. For the uninitiated, it is essentially an adaptation of a logistic regression model that gives a true reflection on the abilities of a set of competing entities based on a set of pairwise comparisons. It is particularly useful in ranking sports with an irregular fixture schedule, such as international cricket, where a standard points system may not work.
So, in this case, it looks at all the results in our hypothetical WTC, and fits abilities for each team that most accurately explain the observed results. This ensures that variations in fixture difficulty are accounted for and gives a more accurate reflection on the respective qualities of the competing teams.
For this model, we have also introduced an ‘order effect’ for home advantage. This effectively means that away wins are given greater weight than home advantage. This weight is automatically derived from observing at what rate home teams tend to win and ensures that the final ability ratings are not influenced by a home or away skew in the fixtures.
And so, for the third time, we see India and New Zealand as our top two teams, cementing the fact that, in this scenario at least, the final would indeed be contested by the two best teams.
This might not always be the case however. The most striking thing here is Sri Lanka’s drop from third, as calculated by the WTC rankings, to 5th when we model their ‘true’ ability. In fact, they are only just above South Africa in 6th, despite scoring 120 more WTC points than them.
When discussing the differences in each teams’ respective fixture list, we noted that Sri Lanka had arguably the most favourable set of fixtures, given that they did not have to play either India or Australia. This analysis seems to indicate that the favourable fixtures did help them out, meaning they ranked 3rd despite only just being the 5th best team. In this case it did not affect the finalists, but it does indicate that in future that an average team, with a bit of luck in the fixture scheduling, might just be able to muscle their way into the final.
Similarly, we also noted that Australia had probably the hardest set of fixtures. This saw them only able to claim 5th in the WTC points system, but our model indicates that they were comfortably in the top 4 in terms of ability, and almost level with England in 3rd.
What does this all mean?
Ultimately, despite its various oddities, it does seem as though the World Test Championship will at least provide us with two worthy finalists – effectively debunking the idea that the tournament is some kind of unfair aberration. As seen from Sri Lanka's performance, however, a favourable fixture schedule might give the opportunity for an outsider to make a good run at the top two.
On a broader note, it remains to be seen whether the World Test Championship will go on to become a cornerstone of the cricketing calendar, or merely a biannual exhibition match that no-one pays much attention to.
For now it seems to just be simmering away in the background, although that is to be expected at this early stage. The legacy of the tournament will likely be guided by the cricket that takes place towards the latter stages. If there are a couple of late tournament series that also double up as effective semi-finals for the WTC, the tournament could really start to capture the imagination. If this is then followed up by a classic at Lord’s for the final, then it could go a long way to giving the ICC a true showpiece for Test cricket to go alongside the ODI and T20I World Cups.
Conversely, if the finalists are confirmed a year in advance and we get a drab draw for the final when it eventually comes around, it’s possible that a great deal of cricket fans may not even notice it’s happened.
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