[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by The Old Man: *
The PWC ratings does not take into account the full career but rather the lastest. That's why Lara and S.Waugh is missing.
[/QUOTE]
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[source=cricketratings.com]
Weâve had a large number of emails recently with questions about the PwC Ratings and what we do or donât take into account. For example, you have written to ask why we donât take account of where the match is played, dropped catches, exactly which bowler the batsman was facing for each delivery, the stage of the innings when runs were scoredâŚand so on. In theory, it would be possible to take account of all these factors, and many more. So why donât we? The short answer is that if you are trying to rate cricketers statistically without including subjective assessments (eg was that a dropped catch or not?) you have to stop somewhere. We could include more factors, but we have taken the rating of cricketers about as far as we believe is credible. Thatâs only our opinion, and debate and discussion is a healthy and essential part of this whole matter of rating cricketers.
For those who want a more detailed understanding of our philosophy behind the ratings, the following is a rather longer discussion. We are, as ever, interested in your comments, but we apologise in advance that we are unable to respond in any detail to all your emails.
A. WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE RATINGS?
In designing cricket rankings, the question âwhat are they for?â is critical. Most people broadly think that rankings are there to pick out who are the current âbestâ players But what does âbestâ mean? Does it mean the player with the best technical ability? Or the player who is currently in the hottest form (regardless of what he was doing a year ago)? Or is it the player who has the best career record, even if he is currently going through a bad patch? Each of these definitions requires a different type of ranking.
So what type of ranking is ours? The PwC Ratings are designed to put more emphasis on what a player has done in his recent matches than on what he did earlier in his career. This means that they will tend to reflect the players who are in form. However, ours are not âform ratingsâ as such (we would understand form ratings to mean you should only take into account recent matches, whereas the PwC Ratings take into account every match a player has ever played). A better way of understanding the PwC Ratings, and our meaning of the term âbest playersâ, is to view them as attempting to measure:
"Which players (if fit) would be selected for a World XI to play a match tomorrow."
In designing our Ratings, we have produced a system that ensures that players with a sustained run of good form (such as Michael Vaughan) can rise to very high rankings despite modest records earlier in their career. At the same time, established great players like Inzamam-ul-Haq or Chris Cairns who might play very few matches in a year due to injury, or simply due to circumstances beyond their control such as tours being cancelled, do not plunge to unreasonably low Ratings.
B. HOW SHOULD TESTS AND ODIs BE TREATED?
Traditionally, in assessing âbestâ cricketers, commentators have tended to look purely at performances in Tests. With the growing influence of ODI cricket, we donât believe this view is appropriate.
We do, however, regard Test and ODI cricket as different forms of the game. Some cricketers excel in only one form of the game (eg Bevan in ODIs, Gavaskar in Tests), and we believe that player ratings should be able to bring out this important element. This is why we believe that separate ratings should be produced for Test and ODI cricket.
However, the âbestâ cricketers are those who can perform in both forms of the game. It should therefore be possible to combine a playerâs Test and ODI Rating, and this can only be done if the points systems are compatible. (If, for example, Test Ratings are scored on a scale of 0 to 100 and ODIs on a scale of 0 to 10,000 it is meaningless to add the two together).
Because of the way that we have designed the PwC Ratings, a meaningful combined Test/ODI Rating is obtained simply by adding the two points tables together, although we have not tended to publish our combined Rating in the past. Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting and Matthew Hayden would currently be vying to top such a combined Rating for batting, while one of Muttiah Muralitharan and Glenn McGrath would top the bowling.
C. WHAT SKILLS SHOULD BE RATED(batsmen, bowlers, fielders, all-rounders)?
Should ratings be of overall cricketing ability or of individual skills? Because they are such different disciplines, we have always kept separate lists for batsmen and bowlers, in keeping with the historic way in which averages have been presented. However, since there is always an interest in all-rounders, we produce an index of all-rounders as a back-up to our main lists. An all-rounder can be measured simply by adding his batting and bowling points together, but we believe it is nonsense to describe a player who scores 700 points for batting and 0 for bowling as an all-rounder, since he does not bowl. We therefore produce our all-rounder index by multiplying batting and bowling points together. In our points system, a 500bat+400bowl type player therefore ranks higher as an all-rounder than a 600+300 or a 900+0 player.
In rating a cricketer, there is also the key factor of fielding ability. In an ideal world, fielding ability should be included too. However, we do not believe that it is possible to produce a credible rating for fielders or wicketkeepers without an enormous amount of subjective judgment. For example, is it really fair to judge a wicketkeeper on catches and stumpings? What if the bowlers he is keeping to donât create those chances? Who is going to assess the missed chances, and how does one measure a dropped catch against a catch that a slow keeper didnât even go for? And when it comes to fielding, how can cover point be compared with first slip?
We believe that an attempt at fielding ratings would simply undermine the more credible ratings for batting and bowling.
D. WHAT FUNDAMENTAL FACTORS SHOULD BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT ?
We believe that Ratings should, as far as possible, treat all players equally, with no bias, deliberate or otherwise, towards their country or their personal reputation.
Any cricket lover is capable of rating a player, and in doing so will undoubtedly take into account the style of their strokeplay, their charisma and other human factors. A statistical rating cannot do this, and should not attempt to do so. There are no acceptable ways of measuring the quality of strokeplay, and there are no universally agreed criteria for saying that scoring your runs in front of square is superior to scoring them through third man. Nor is there any objective way of assessing the quality of a pitch. We therefore believe that players should only be rated using information available from a scorebook. We believe that to overcome the obvious anomalies of conventional averages, player rankings need to take account of the following:
Batsmen
number of runs scored
whether he was dismissed or not
who he scored his runs against
the level of run-scoring in the match
(and in ODI cricket, the rate of scoring runs is crucial)
Bowlers
wickets taken
runs conceded
the batsmen dismissed
(and in ODI cricket, the economy rate is crucial)
We believe that a rating system cannot be fair unless a batsmanâs runs are adjusted to take some account of the level of run scoring in the match. 100 runs scored in an innings of 600 do not have the same impact as 100 runs scored in an innings of 200, and 100 runs made against the current Australian attack should be worth more than 100 runs against the current Bangladeshis. Likewise, a bowler who dismisses Tendulkar and Dravid deserves more credit than one who dismisses Kumble and Khan.
We believe that if you are to extend beyond simple averages, these factors are the fundamental for a cricket Rating, and they are the underlying factors used in the PwC Ratings.
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