Ranking cricket teams

•Proposal of graph and count weightage based ranking algorithms.•Addition of parameters (number of runs and wickets) for graph weightage.•Study of the affect of damping factor on different PageRank based ranking methods.

Teams are ranked to show their authority over each other. Existing methods rank the cricket teams using an ad-hoc points system entirely based on the winning and losing of matches and ignores number of runs or wickets from which a team wins. In this paper, adoptions of h-index and PageRank are proposed for ranking teams to overcome the weakness of existing methods. Each team is represented by a node in the graph with two teams creates a weighted directed edge between each other by playing a match and the losing team points to the winning team. The intuition is to get more points for a team winning from a stronger team than winning from a weaker team by considering the number of runs or wickets also in addition to just winning and losing matches. The results show that proposed ranking methods provide quite promising insights of one day and test team rankings. The effect of damping factor d is also studied on the performance of PageRank based methods on both ODI and test matches teams ranking and interesting trends are found.