New Delhi: Following a shock semi-final exit to India within the 2017 one-day worldwide (ODI) World Cup, the Australian ladies’s cricket group hit the reset button. And the way. Within the subsequent 5 years, they received two World T20 titles, a ladies’s ODI championship, 40 of 42 ODIs performed together with a world-record 26 on the trot, the Ashes, and the 2022 ODI World Cup final week.
It’s additionally raised the query of the place does this Meg Lanning-led group’s dominance match within the quick historical past of ladies’s cricket, and even how its dominance compares in opposition to that of the good West Indian and Australian males’s sides. The quick reply: Meg Lanning’s Australia are worthy of their achievements, although statistically nonetheless not the most effective the world has ever seen.
Head and shoulders above
For this comparative evaluation, we relied on a spinoff of the ELO scores popularised by chess. Named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor, the ELO score system not solely considers match outcomes but additionally the relative high quality of the opposition. Thus, it rewards groups extra once they beat stronger opposition, versus weaker opposition. And it additionally allows some comparability over time.
In males’s Take a look at cricket, the true measure of sophistication throughout the three codecs, three groups stand out since 1975 for setting up defining intervals of dominance. These are Clive Lloyd’s West Indies (1982 to 1988), Steve Waugh’s Australia (1999 to 2003) and Ricky Ponting’s Australia (2004 to 2008). Chart 1 reveals how every of those groups broke away from different groups. Every did it over a number of years. Every raised the ELO bar. The height ELO score of that West Indian facet was 1,288 (June 1986). Waugh’s Australian facet raised it to 1,311 (January 2001) and Ponting’s facet raised it additional to 1,485 in December 2007, the very best until date.
[Chart 1]
Dominance of the Australian ladies’s facet
In comparison with males’s cricket, a essential mass in ladies’s cricket, with extra groups taking part in one another and taking part in extra continuously, is an incidence of this century. Combining Exams and ODI outcomes into an ELO score reveals the Australian ladies’s group’s dominance has been extra frequent and run longer than its male counterparts.
The primary interval was 1982 to 1993 once they received successive World Cups in 1982 and 1988, and the second interval was from 1997 to 2005 once they had been led by Belinda Clark. Because the mid-2000s, like males’s cricket, ladies’s cricket has additionally loved higher competitors on the prime. This was earlier than the present Australian ladies’s facet emerged in 2018, rewrote historical past the books, and achieved a better ELO score than throughout Belinda Clark’s reign. Thus, whereas the 1997 to 2005 Australian ladies’s facet had an extended run on the prime at a time when there was much less ladies’s cricket performed, the present Australian ladies’s group is embarking on dominance amid a busier schedule and higher opposition.
[Chart 2]
Not precisely inside touching distance
Evaluating the boys’s and girls’s ELO scores wouldn’t be correct as every is taking part in a special set of opposition. Nonetheless, one crude measure to check dominance is the differential between the ELO score of those 5 dominant sides to that of the next-best facet. This differential tells us the size of dominance with respect to the competitors on the time.
On this rely, the groups led by Belinda Clark, Clive Lloyd and Ricky Ponting stand out. For half the size of their dominance, their mark-up in ELO score to the next-best facet was above 15%. Even the highs had been considerably increased (starting from 29% to 47%). The place Meg Lanning’s present Australian facet stands out shouldn’t be giving different sides a sniff. Throughout its ongoing reign, the closest the next-best ELO has come to the Australian ELO is 5%, which is a big hole at a time when ladies’s cricket is energetic, widespread and aggressive. The opposite 4 sides on this set have seen the opposition shut in inside 2%.
[Chart 3]
Indian groups are late bloomers
How do the 2 Indian groups fare on ELO scores? A take a look at their ELO scores since 1975 reveals each these traces trending up. Each the boys’s and girls’s facet have occupied the highest spot, the boys for extra and longer spells. And even when they aren’t, the differentials to the highest facet is lesser than it was final century.
The very best ELO score the Indian males’s group have achieved in checks is 1,310 (September 2017). That determine for Indian ladies (Exams plus ODIs) is 1,596 (Might, 2020). That’s removed from the height ELO score the dominant males’s and girls’s sides have achieved, and that’s additionally the distinction between the nice and the good.
[Chart 4]
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