Tuesday, 14 March 2006

Rankings update

Shane Bond made a dramatic leap in the ICC test ratings after the first test, moving from 12th to 5th equal on the bowling table. He could easily have leapt even higher, being even on points with Makhaya Ntini and only 1 point behind Mathhew Hoggard who is in 4th place.

Matthew Hoggard is the 4th best bowler in the world? When the hell did that happen?

Bond's test rating is now at a career high of 778.

Meanwhile Dan Vettori continued his slow return from the basement by climbing 5 places to rank at 17th in the world.

On the one-day table Bond and Vettori have again made gains, this time thanks to poor bowling by Brett Lee in South Africa. Lee's decline has meant both Bond and Vettori have climbed one place, to 3rd and 4th place respectively. Glenn McGrath is at number 2 and only 6 ratings points ahead of Bond. Given that he is not expected to play for Australia again until next season, McGrath's rating should drop below Bond and Vettori sometime during April's one-day matches in Bangladesh.

1 comment:

Karl said...

Incredibly, Bond isn't even on his full ranking yet. This from the explanation of how the rankings work:

"New players start at zero points, and need to establish themselves before they get full ratings. There is a scale for calculating qualifications ... A bowler who has taken 30 wickets also gets 70% of his full rating. He doesn’t get 100% until he has taken 100 Test wickets. This means that successful new players can enter the top 30 after just a few Tests, but are unlikely to reach the world top 5 until they have many Test matches under their belts."

Bond has only 13 test matches under his belt, with 63 wickets.

What will have helped him get his high rating are the quality of the wickets - bowling Lara with the first ball he has bowled to him each time does boost his ratings higher.