Quote:
Originally Posted by zman
^I see your reasoning which is purely based on analytics and can appreciate your effort. I however looked at things at a much higher level and kept things simple. Way I look at it, if we're going to have so many tiers for only 10 teams, then why not add a couple more and just rank them instead 
Your tiers are a reflection of past performance alone, which is fine. My system by comparison is a two tier system (for test cricket only) and in creating my tiers I tried to answer one simple but key question--which teams are likely to win or draw against the opposition if a match is played at home? Additionally, I took into account certain intangibles, namely upcoming retirement of certain key players and markedly improved performance of certain teams in recent times.
I've mentioned in other threads, teams like SL, WI, Pak--each of them are retirement of couple of aging marquee players away from dropping down a notch. Ban and Zim on the other hand have developed a solid core who have been playing together for quite some time now and recently started showing solid and consistent progress.
One other thing, teams in my top tier are likely to win against teams in the bottom tier whether matches are played at home or away. But Pak is the only exception in my mind. They could become mediocre when Younis and Misbah retire, or if they somehow find a couple of decent replacements they could crack the top tier, only because they have a superb bowling attack to back their batsmen. This conundrum led me to introduce a temporary middle tier composed of one team, which will no longer be required in a year or two.
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Agreed 100%. I guess both of us were thinking along similar lines but had different ways of saying it.
By the way, the competitiveness in Test cricket is pretty worrying. We can say it's due to the key retirements of some of the players but I can honestly say there just isn't good quality amongst the Test teams. The only one I really rate is South Africa because they've proven themselves home and away and not to mention, they've beaten all the top sides. England's a pretty good side and they've also proven themselves home and away. Big test coming up for them against Australia.
The rest on the other hand I can't really rate as very good Test sides. India and Australia are better than the others but question is are they really that good? India lost 8 matches away from home against Australia and England and then Australia lost 7 games to India and England. For the rest of the teams, well the less said the better.
Now is the time where the competitiveness in Tests needs to be at a high point, especially since the popularity of the format has gone down. It's hard however to have people interested when the matches are of such low quality and when the matches are lopsided.