Which is the greatest England Test team of all time?
The ebbs and flows of England's 1000-Test journey are derived using an adaptation of Elo algorithm
Devashish Fuloria
31-Jul-2018
One-hundred-and-forty-one years. That's how long England have taken to become the first country to play 1000 Test matches. That's slow. Possibly the slowest completion of any 1000-mark across any sport anywhere in the world.
Olympic runners are fast. They finish 1000-meter races in less than 150 seconds. They are very fast. On the other hand, goal-scoring in football is a difficult and slow process. No footballer has yet scored 1000 goals because their careers do not last long enough. Still if Josef Bican, or Romario, or Pele, three players with more than 750 goals each, had hypothetically achieved the holy grail of 1000 goals, it would not have taken them 141 years.
Cricket is a slow game. We are aware of that. And Test matches, well, they are 20 times slower than a football game. Generations before us couldn't have imagined this 1000 was possible. And the way Tests are being taken care of, quite possibly generations after ours wouldn't know what it is like to see a team reach this landmark.
England would be proud; this has come before a World Cup win for them and in this race it is likely they will never be overtaken. Not even by Australia, who are at least 15 years behind (188 matches to go for 1000) despite starting on the same day.
1877: a cricket odyssey
Starring: Grace, Hutton, Brearley, Hussain, Strauss and Cook
The year 1877 was a landmark one in Britain. Queen Victoria was proclaimed the Empress of India in January, Wimbledon hosted its first Tennis championship and the Cambridge-Oxford boat race ended in a draw for the only time in its history.
But the game that would go on to create legends like Bradman, Viv, Lara, Sobers, Botham, Lillee, Tendulkar, Warne, Wasim, etc. was conceived thousands of miles away in Melbourne, where a group of men, one of them born in 1827, took part in the first-ever Test against Australia between March 15 and 19, a match they lost by 45 runs. Exactly hundred years later, another England team led by Tony Greig would lose to Australia by exactly the same margin at the same ground.
England played a lot of cricket between those two matches and have played a lot since, and every win, loss and draw has been represented in the figure above. These ebbs and flows of England's 1000-Test journey were derived using an adaptation of Elo algorithm, explained in this piece, and they provide a peek into the team's standings relative to others at different points of time.
To interpret the numbers on the vertical axis, one can use this thumb rule: 1600 or greater means a good team, 1500 means average team, and below 1400 is a poor team. So it can be inferred then that across its history England have been an above-average team. For the sake of comparison, consider Australia, the faint yellow squiggle towering above all others, who have been very good for large part of their history.
Australia caused the first blip in England's curve in 1882, a result so shocking at the time that it ended up giving birth to the greatest rivalry in cricket - the Ashes. Despite that loss though, England remained dominant in the early days of Test cricket and stayed over the 1500-mark through the two wars during which they lost nine Test cricketers.
In between the wars were Douglas Jardine's years as captain when his ruthless and headline-grabbing Bodyline tactics bruised many an Australian.
Towards the right edge of the graph, visible clearly above the valley separating them, are the twin peaks of England's 2005 Ashes win and their rise to No. 1 ranking in 2011.
The only major noticeable dip occurred under the leadership of David Gower (and Mike Gatting for a couple of years) through the 1980s, during which period they drew a blank in 24 tries against West Indies, and through the 1990s. Coincidentally, the start of the prolonged depression in England's fortunes coincided with Margaret Thatcher's era of wholesale changes in the UK.
A slow turnaround for the team began only after they hit their lowest-ever ratings - 1340 - during 1989 home Ashes loss, a result that also marked the end of the Gower era, but it still took another decade for England to cross the marker of 1500 rating points or being an above-average team.
England and its captains
Graham Gooch, Michael Atherton and Nasser Hussain, the captains in the 1990s, all left a positive mark on the team, leaving the team on a higher note compared to where they had started. Although the average rating during their tenure wasn't markedly different from Gower's in the 1980s when England had nosedived, the three not only arrested further fall but also raised the team's profile to make sure the captains who followed had a stronger base. The win/loss ratio improved from a paltry 0.27 under Gower to 1.13 under Hussain.
Only the prominent 16 among the 80 England Test captains have been considered here. A cut-off of at least 30 Tests as captain was used for the period after 1960, while five major names - WG Grace, Douglas Jardine, Wally Hammond, Len Hutton and Peter May - were picked from the era before that.
There are many notable absentees like Ian Botham, Alec Stewart, and Colin Cowdrey, who lost a home series to West Indies a few days after Bobby Charlton's football team lifted the World Cup.
Among the pre-60s captains, Jardine and Hutton stood out despite not much difference in ratings during their tenure. The two got teams that were on a downward trend, but lifted them by more than 100 rating points by the time they left.
Both Jardine and Hutton, however, were to be trumped by Mike Brearley in the late 1970s. In the 31 Tests that he led England in, Brearley won 18 and lost only four, bumping up the team ratings by a staggering 147 points to No. 1 in Tests, and making him, based on these calculations, the most impactful captain in England's history.
England were the No. 1 team for a considerably long period of time under Grace and briefly under Jardine, May and Illingworth as well, but it was in the 2000s, in a highly competitive environment, that England achieved the No. 1 status under the leadership of Andrew Strauss when they displaced in 2011 the then top-ranked Test team - India - after a 4-0 win in a home series, and in process achieved their best-ever ratings - 1670. It was after almost 30 years that England had been at the top.
Fantasy play-offs from Back to the Future
Because Elo algorithm inherently calculates the expected result based on the current ratings of the teams, it lets us play with the hypothetical 'what if' scenarios, something a cricket buff who's a time-machine inventor would do.
What if Grace's England were stuffed into the DeLorean and and brought to 2011 to play against Strauss' team? What if Jardine's men took on Brearley's? If Strauss' 2011 team was the best, what chance would other teams have against them.
All pre-1980s teams (except Hammond's) considered in this piece stood more than 40% chance, at their best, against Strauss' 2011 team but three captains - Gower, Gooch and Atherton - would have had a hard time leading against them.
The team that would have stood the best chance - 47% - was Vaughan's, right after they completed that amazing Ashes win in 2005. During the course of that one series, Vaughan's team overtook bests of Illingworth, then May, then Jardine, Brearley and then Grace to hit 1648 rating points, England's best ever till then, until Strauss took over and hit 1670, after a 4-0 win against India.
Where to, England?
England have hit a lull since the success in 2011. The team lost 94 rating points under the leadership of Alastair Cook and have dropped further under Joe Root, to 1430 rating points. But an opportunity awaits. If England beat India, the current No. 1 side, in the upcoming series by any margin, they will collect a bounty of points that should take them close, if not beyond, the 1500 marker.
A winning start in their 1000th match would be the first step. Even if they lose, England, who play the most matches every year and have strong backing to Test cricket, will keep coming back.
The game should feel proud. Fifty years of restlessness regarding the pace of it and the subsequent emergence of shorter formats has not managed to obliterate Test cricket. Not just yet.
Devashish Fuloria is a doctor, an engineer, a full-time entrepreneur and a part-time writer based in Bangalore