Whilst I was at a bit of a loose end I found this, ICC historical test match rankings going back to 1952. The graph below is England's ICC ranking points from 1952 to 2020, to simplify the exercise I've taken one ranking a year as at March  (or as close as I can get to March if no March results.) What I was interested in was whether the ICC rankings could provide some insight into how effective the decision was to put England players onto central contracts in 1999, an issue I first looked at here . The year 2000 is marked by the vertical line on the chart,   I'll come clean and say I was expecting the evidence to show central contracts to have no impact on test performance. But I have to admit the data shows something rather different.   The average ranking in the period prior to central contracts is 101 compared to 104 for the period after central contracts.  Given my complete lack of statistical know - how, I'm on shaky ground here, but I used variou...

Cricinfo has this  interview with ECB "Performance Director" Mo Bobat.  Bobat makes an interesting claim about county cricket, "Take something like county batting average. We know that a county batting average does not significantly predict an international batting average, so a lot of the conventional things that are looked at as being indicators of success - they don't really stand true in a predictive sense."  And later in the article there is a graph, showing county averages plotted against test averages for 13 English test batsmen.  This is reproduced below. better than random? raw data suggests no meaningful link between championship and test averages 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 Test County Championship Sam Curran England players' batting averages...