A month ago I was sitting in an office in Bangalore with Y. Ananth Narayan, the man who devised the new Wisden 100 ratings system, fine-tuning the parameters over a curry that threatened to blister the paintwork. After exchanging dozens of e-mails over several months, we made some final adjustments to the weightings of the various factors used - there are 12 involved for batting, and eight for bowling. We then declared the ratings closed and moved on to TGI Friday's (Bangalore branch). We hoped that the announcement of The Wisden 100 would generate some media interest. It did, and the lists were generally well-received. The Times did us proud, with a full-page spread that has been framed by our man in Bangalore. I spent a day talking about the lists to more radio stations than I'd ever heard of, before reeling home to a darkened room where no-one asked me who on earth Hugh Tayfield was.

In came some thought-provoking e-mails from people wondering why a favourite innings of theirs didn't make the cut. The answer, usually, is that any memorable innings which you were lucky enough to have witnessed yourself is remembered fondly. And sometimes a particular set of circumstances which are not apparent from the scorecard are burned in the mind - great knocks like Basil D'Oliveira's defiant 158 at The Oval in 1968, which indirectly led to South Africa's excommunication from world cricket, or Dean Jones's 210 at Madras in 1986-87, when he threw up on the pitch and then spent the night in hospital on an intravenous drip.

The trouble, when assessing more than 54,000 individual Test innings, is that external influences like that cannot be turned into numbers. We can calculate the percentage of the team's score, the degree to which the batsman had to shepherd the lower order, and the relative strength of the opposition attack - and these are among the factors used to work out our batting lists. But we don't always know the speed of scoring, or if the innings was chanceless. For most early Tests we don't know how many balls the batsmen faced, let alone whether or not they were ever dropped.

So there was a degree of interest from England and Australia ... and then there was India, where the announcement provoked widespread outrage that none of Sachin Tendulkar's innings made the top 100. This wasn't helped by a widespread assumption that we were talking about ranking great players rather than great individual innings or bowling performances. The Indian Express didn't pull any punches with its headline: "Oh Jesus, the cricketing bible excludes the great Indian god".

On the face of it the absence of Tendulkar is indeed surprising, as he has scored 25 Test hundreds already (but remember that there have been well over 2000 Test centuries all told). However, most of the highest-ranked innings in The Wisden 100 are tide-turning, matchwinning performances like Don Bradman's 270 in 1936-37, which is top, or Ian Botham's rollicking 149 not out at Headingley in 1981, which lies fourth. Only six of Tendulkar's tons have led to Indian wins, and his two double-centuries have come in draws against weakish bowling attacks - 217 against New Zealand in 1999-2000, and 201 not out v Zimbabwe last year. Oddly, Tendulkar's top-rated innings (169 v South Africa at Cape Town in 1996-97) came in a match that India lost.

Don't forget, too, that this list rates individual innings rather than a collection of them or a player's entire career. Over his career, Tendulkar has been fantastically consistent, as his Test average of well over 50 shows. Since he scored his first Test century, in 1990 when only 17, he has failed to make a hundred in a series of three or more Tests only four times (and in one of those he managed a 97). If you set the Wisden ratings to assses whole careers rather than individual performances, guess who is the highest-rated current player? Yes, it's Tendulkar.

There were even suggestions that Wisden snubbed Sachin by deliberately leaving him out, which could not be further from the truth. There is nothing deliberate about it: the factors were decided upon separately, and then the computer took over. The ratings aren't in any way anti-Indian, either - they were actually devised by an Indian, our statistical analyst, Ananth Narayan, who beamed broadly when VVS Laxman ended up in the Top Ten of the batting list and Anil Kumble came second in the bowling.

No, it's just an impartial list - with elements that are arguable, we will readily admit, because of the subjective decisions that lie behind the weightings. Until we know exactly who bowled to whom at each stage of an innings (and we'll never know that for all Tests, because some scorebooks are gone for ever), when those catches went down, and the names of all batsmen placed on intravenous drips shortly after being dismissed, we'll have to settle for informed impartiality. And that's what Wisden is famous for, after all.

Steven Lynch is database director of Wisden Online

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