Chris Waters: Pointless ICC Test match rankings are just not cricket

“This side is starting to fulfil their potential and I think they are a young side who can go all the way to world No 1 as quickly as possible and be there for a while,” he said.

Few who saw Ben Stokes smash a double hundred in Cape Town, or Stuart Broad rip through the South African batting in Johannesburg, would disagree.

England have just beaten the current No 1 side in their own backyard and will win the four-match series 3-0 with victory in the final Test at Centurion starting on Friday.

All well and good, but let us consider this “world No 1” tag of which Botham speaks.

Time and again, we are all guilty of going on about it as though it is the cricketing equivalent of the Holy Grail.

When Andrew Strauss was appointed England’s director of cricket last year, he announced – as though parroting from a script – that “it’s really important we get to No 1 in the world”.

Strauss, who was captain when England last held that distinction in 2012, effectively acknowledged it as the ultimate barometer, even if his own No 1 priority is to see England improve their one-day fortunes.

The reality, however, is that the Test match rankings system, administered by the International Cricket Council, the game’s governing body, is a largely unfathomable waste of time.

Granted, it provides a certain amount of kudos and financial reward; the country that tops the rankings on the annual cut-off date of April 1 receives $1m and what the ICC describes as an “iconic” mace – although I could have misread the word “chronic”.But the rankings system is so complex that few outside the ICC can properly understand it – at least not those of us who occasionally venture into the broad daylight.

Indeed, the much-maligned Duckworth-Lewis system – the method used to calculate revised targets in weather-affected one-day games – seems almost child’s play by comparison.

In an effort to discover how the rankings system works, for I readily admit that I neither know nor care, I logged on to the ICC’s website.

The first sentence explained that a team’s rating is “worked out by dividing the points scored by the match/series total, with the answer given to the nearest whole number”, at which point I immediately logged off again and made a cup of coffee.

When I finally summed up the will to return and investigate further, I worked out that there are 1,500 words explaining how points are awarded depending on the respective strengths of sides, and how results are “weighted” over a three-to-four-year period, which is the period on which the ratings are calculated.

“Period One covers the earliest two years of matches and Period Two covers all subsequent series, ie the past one to two years,” said the ICC’s information sheet, which is the reason why South Africa are No 1 despite not having won a Test match for over 12 months.

The information sheet added: “The ‘match/series total’ column in the Reliance ICC Test Team Rankings table comprises a combination of individual Tests and series.

“This total, along with the number of points earned in each period, is multiplied by the weighting factor.

“For example, suppose a team played 20 Tests and six series in Period One, plus 15 Tests and five series in Period Two.

“The total matches played for rating purposes is 50 per cent of (20+6) plus 100 per cent of (15+5), which equals 33.

“A small technical adjustment ensures that, for all teams, the total number of matches and rating points is always a whole number.”

There is literally reams of this stuff, which might be easy for some people to understand but which most cricket fans would find incomprehensible.

The reality is that Test cricket – magnificently in my opinion – does not lend itself to being put into this sort of context and has got along very nicely without it thank you for most of its lifespan.

A format that began in 1877 does not fit in with the modern thirst for league tables and for everything to be conveniently measured, simply because it takes months for teams to play each other home and away.

Rankings based over a three-to-four-year period are absurd, a bit like a football club being top of a table based on results achieved in previous seasons.

Some have argued instead for a Test Championship, with semi-finals and a final, and also for divisional Test cricket, with perhaps two divisions of six including Ireland and Afghanistan.

But how long before the bottom division faded into obscurity, with Test cricket already dying out in places such as the Caribbean?

Experiments with day/night Tests and pink balls are all well and good, but a Test match rankings system has limited value.

As proved by South Africa’s poor showing in the current series, which makes a mockery of their No 1 status and England’s current position at No 6, it is a gimmick dressed up as something important.