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It's a funny new world Wisden CricInfo staff - October 15, 2001
Monday, October 15, 2001 The ICC said last week that it is aiming to start a one-day World Championship to go with the Test one. A fine idea in principle, but how on earth do you go about it? Here, from the back of a Wisden envelope, is one answer. Like the Test Championship, it has the virtue of simplicity. It takes all the one-dayers played around the world since a given date - in this case, the end of the 1999 World Cup. (There have been 276 of them, or one every three days.) It tots up how many each team have won and lost, and divides the wins by the losses, to allow for the fact that some teams play a lot more than others. Australia have won 40 games and lost 10, so their win ratio is 4. Zimbabwe have won 17 and lost 53, so theirs is 0.32. Australia are therefore about 12 times better than Zimbabwe. You can decide for yourself whether this feels right on present form. The system is rough-and-ready. It doesn't reward the winners of the big games. It doesn't recognise dead matches (say, between two teams who have both already qualified for the final of a triangular). It doesn't distinguish between home and away, or recent and less recent. It offers as much of a reward for beating Bangladesh as for beating Australia - except that Australia's record would be dented, whereas Bangladesh's would be untouched. It might encourage middling teams to play too much against the duffers - although they would surely pay for this in terms of crowds and TV revenue. But it's a start. What do you think? Any enhancements most welcome, but please try to observe the golden rule of sporting formats (we might call it the Lewis-Duckworth law, since it is the opposite of Duckworth-Lewis): there's nothing stupid about keeping it simple.
One-day internationals
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