Another take at the best Test captains
A stats piece that takes a fresh look at Test captains and results

The tendency of Mark Taylor's team to lose dead rubbers cost his captaincy numbers • Getty Images
I've taken each Test and calculated the overall batting average and the overall bowling average for each team. The latter was done by weighting each bowler's average according to the number of balls bowled in each innings. If there were two innings, I took the average of the two innings. That's a bit lazy of me, but it shouldn't make too much difference. (All averages are adjusted using the methods explained in this post.)
The fractions of wins does basically what we'd expect – it starts out flat and very low for teams that are outclassed, before rising steadily before plateauing. There are always going to be some draws (because of rain), so the fraction of wins won't hit zero or one. Even the weakest of home teams can achieve a draw rate of about 30% (well, maybe not Bangladesh), whereas very weak teams away can only draw about 20% of Tests.
The trend in draws is a bit different. It seems to go gently upwards until the teams are evenly matched, and then more sharply downwards as the home team becomes stronger.

For the wins, it's flat at 0.031 below x = -13.7, then upwards until x = 17.2, and then flat at a value of 0.785.
So now, for each Test, I calculate the difference in strength. Then I plug that number into the fitted graphs to get a fraction of a win, draw, and loss. For example, suppose that the teams are evenly matched. Then the home side gets 0.366 wins, 0.424 draws, 0.21 losses. The wins and losses for the away side are flipped: 0.21 wins and 0.366 losses.
You do this for each Test that a captain plays, and add up the expected wins, draws, and losses. Now we can compare to the actual record.
There's a question here about how to deal with draws. I decided to ignore them, for a couple of reasons. The first is that teams which score runs faster should have less draws, but I didn't take strike rate into account when doing the regressions above (I don't have strike rate data for all Test batsmen). Also, all Tests in Australia (as well as some elsewhere) were played to a finish between 1882/3 and World War II – no draws in a major cricketing country for over sixty years!
So while I'm happy that draws became almost extinct under Steve Waugh's captaincy as his batsmen increased average scoring rates, he's not going to benefit from this in this analysis.
Instead I calculated the fraction of wins out of matches that ended in a result, that is: wins / (wins + losses). Do this for the actual value, divide by the expected value, and you get a ratio saying how much better or worse the captain's record is compared to what would be expected.
Whether or not it is reasonable to ascribe all the difference to the captain is certainly debatable, but let's look at the results anyway. The table below shows the number of matches captained, the expected results, the actual results, the expected and actual values of wins/(wins + losses), and the ratio of the latter two. Qualification of 20 Tests.
----expected---- --actual-- exp act captain mat w d l w d l w/(w+l) ratio Abdul Hafeez 23 5.1 7.1 10.8 6 11 6 0.32 0.50 1.56 GP Howarth 30 7.6 11.0 11.4 11 12 7 0.40 0.61 1.52 Inzamam-ul-Haq 31 6.8 11.3 12.9 11 9 11 0.35 0.50 1.44 J Darling 21 6.0 7.8 7.2 7 10 4 0.46 0.64 1.39 JM Brearley 31 11.5 12.0 7.5 18 9 4 0.60 0.82 1.35 GA Gooch 34 8.0 12.5 13.5 10 12 12 0.37 0.45 1.22 RB Richardson 24 8.4 8.2 7.4 11 7 6 0.53 0.65 1.22 MP Vaughan 51 19.0 18.2 13.7 26 14 11 0.58 0.70 1.21 CA Walsh 22 5.7 7.6 8.7 6 9 7 0.40 0.46 1.16 DG Bradman 24 11.7 7.7 4.6 15 6 3 0.72 0.83 1.16 SP Fleming 80 23.3 27.2 29.5 28 25 27 0.44 0.51 1.15 DPMD Jayawardene 26 10.2 8.8 7.0 15 4 7 0.60 0.68 1.14 Nawab of Pataudi 40 7.3 14.6 18.1 9 12 19 0.29 0.32 1.12 IVA Richards 50 22.0 18.1 9.9 27 15 8 0.69 0.77 1.12 N Hussain 45 14.1 15.5 15.5 17 13 15 0.48 0.53 1.12 RB Simpson 39 11.1 14.2 13.7 12 15 12 0.45 0.50 1.11 SM Gavaskar 47 13.9 17.9 15.2 9 30 8 0.48 0.53 1.11 IM Chappell 30 13.0 11.0 6.0 15 10 5 0.69 0.75 1.09 CH Lloyd 74 32.4 26.9 14.8 36 26 12 0.69 0.75 1.09 L Hutton 23 9.9 8.3 4.8 11 8 4 0.67 0.73 1.09 Wasim Akram 25 9.5 7.9 7.6 12 5 8 0.56 0.60 1.08 SM Pollock 26 11.9 8.7 5.4 14 7 5 0.69 0.74 1.07 Imran Khan 48 18.0 18.0 12.0 14 26 8 0.60 0.64 1.06 R Benaud 28 12.5 10.5 5.0 12 12 4 0.71 0.75 1.05 AL Hassett 24 11.7 8.1 4.1 14 6 4 0.74 0.78 1.05 MC Cowdrey 27 10.8 10.0 6.1 8 15 4 0.64 0.67 1.04 RT Ponting 52 28.1 16.4 7.4 35 9 8 0.79 0.81 1.03 SC Ganguly 49 19.7 16.1 13.1 21 15 13 0.60 0.62 1.03 MJK Smith 25 9.6 9.3 6.1 5 17 3 0.61 0.63 1.03 R Illingworth 31 13.7 11.1 6.2 12 14 5 0.69 0.71 1.02 WM Lawry 25 8.5 8.9 7.6 9 8 8 0.53 0.53 1.00 ST Jayasuriya 38 15.1 12.9 10.0 18 8 12 0.60 0.60 1.00 Javed Miandad 34 16.1 11.1 6.8 14 14 6 0.70 0.70 0.99 GC Smith 66 28.6 22.3 15.1 33 15 18 0.65 0.65 0.99 PBH May 41 17.8 14.7 8.5 20 11 10 0.68 0.67 0.98 WJ Cronje 53 25.3 18.1 9.6 27 15 11 0.73 0.71 0.98 GS Chappell 48 19.3 17.8 10.9 21 14 13 0.64 0.62 0.97 RS Dravid 25 9.2 9.4 6.4 8 11 6 0.59 0.57 0.97 AR Border 93 36.4 34.5 22.1 32 39 22 0.62 0.59 0.95 SR Waugh 57 33.3 18.3 5.4 41 7 9 0.86 0.82 0.95 JDC Goddard 22 7.7 8.3 6.0 8 7 7 0.56 0.53 0.95 MA Atherton 54 14.1 19.4 20.4 13 20 21 0.41 0.38 0.94 MA Taylor 50 23.7 17.5 8.8 26 11 13 0.73 0.67 0.91 ER Dexter 30 11.8 11.3 6.9 9 14 7 0.63 0.56 0.89 A Ranatunga 56 16.5 18.6 20.9 12 25 19 0.44 0.39 0.88 ADR Campbell 21 2.4 6.2 12.4 2 7 12 0.16 0.14 0.88 WM Woodfull 25 13.1 7.8 4.1 14 4 7 0.76 0.67 0.87 Kapil Dev 34 9.1 12.1 12.8 4 23 7 0.42 0.36 0.87 WR Hammond 20 8.7 6.9 4.4 4 13 3 0.66 0.57 0.86 HH Streak 21 4.7 6.0 10.3 4 6 11 0.31 0.27 0.85 SR Tendulkar 25 5.9 8.7 10.4 4 12 9 0.36 0.31 0.85 MW Gatting 23 4.9 8.8 9.3 2 16 5 0.35 0.29 0.83 BC Lara 47 10.5 16.1 20.4 10 11 26 0.34 0.28 0.82 M Azharuddin 47 18.6 17.2 11.2 14 19 14 0.62 0.50 0.80 GS Sobers 39 14.4 14.9 9.7 9 20 10 0.60 0.47 0.79 CL Hooper 22 5.1 7.8 9.2 4 7 11 0.36 0.27 0.75 BS Bedi 22 7.0 7.8 7.3 6 5 11 0.49 0.35 0.72 DI Gower 32 6.6 12.0 13.5 5 9 18 0.33 0.22 0.66 JR Reid 34 5.2 11.1 17.8 3 13 18 0.23 0.14 0.63 AC MacLaren 22 6.4 7.9 7.7 4 7 11 0.46 0.27 0.59 KJ Hughes 28 7.4 10.3 10.3 4 11 13 0.42 0.24 0.56 A Flower 20 3.4 6.3 10.2 1 9 10 0.25 0.09 0.36
The results are (of course) far from perfect. Nevertheless, there is plenty to be gleaned from the table. Gavaskar is placed relatively highly, because his teams turned more losses into draws than wins into draws. Thirty draws in 47 Tests is not exciting or something I would encourage captains to aim for, but it helped India's win/loss during that period.
Abdul Hafeez Kardar, Pakistan's first captain, comes out on top by virtue of turning about half of the losses he "should" have had into draws.
Mark Taylor comes out worse than his immediate predecessor and successors, which is at odds with most observers' opinions of his captaincy. Taylor's sides were notorious for losing dead rubbers; if these are excluded then his ratio moves up to around 1.
The one major problem with this analysis occurs with captains with very long reigns. In these cases, the good (or bad) field placings and so forth feed into his bowlers' averages for much (or all) of their careers. This has the effect of making the captain's expected results closer to what they actually were. I don't know how big this effect is. But captains like Border, Fleming, and Lloyd should probably have their ratios moved further away from 1.