ICC’s acting CEO Geoff Allardice has announced that The ‘percentage of points won’ ranking system for the World Test Championship will continue to remain in charge for the WTC 2021-23 cycle.
Earlier, The ICC announced that the World Test Championship points system will be discontinued due to the Covid-19 pandemic and from now on the finalists will be decided on the basis of the percentage of points. The ICC Board gave ok on rules by recommendation of its cricket committee.
ICC to Stick With Percentage of Points System For WTC 2021-23: Geoff Allardice
CEO Allardice has declared that, for the WTC 2021-2023 cycle, all the teams qualified and participating will play against each other and further the top two will be qualified for the finals clash.
“I think we are going to stick with the percentage of points – one method to rank a team. When we looked at the first 12 months of the competition, you had teams on a number of points, but it was all relative to how many series they played,” he said.
“One of the ways to compare teams on an ongoing basis is what proportion of the points that have been available in the matches they played, and if they actually won. And that percentage served us well in the second half of the championship. That is part of the changes.
ICC to allot equal points from the next cycle of Test Championship
“The other thing is, if we are using the percentage of points one, we can put a standardised number of points per Test match, so it doesn’t matter whether it’s a two-Test series or a five-Test series; the same number of points will be available for each match that’s played, but every team will be judged on the percentage of those points that it wins and not on the total”. He added.
Earlier methods and principles for qualification received alot of criticism which Allardice looked into it and put a change on it.
“The principle that we had when we created the competition was that every match in a series that was played as part of the Test Championship should count. The point system was also to try and reflect that a two-match series is worth the same as a five-match series. That was trying to make sure that everyone was playing for the same number of points in total, everyone was playing for the same number of points home and away,” he said.
“One of things that happened during this cycle is that it became evident that not everyone was going to complete their six series as a result of some of the postponements due to Covid. So we left the final in the spot in the calendar where it was originally scheduled. But because we are going to have teams playing an uneven number of series we needed to tweak the points system to try and make it as fair as possible and to make sure it reflected the matches that they did play rather than too heavily influenced by what they didn’t play”, he concluded.
