Former Pakistani cricketer Basit Ali has raised many questions about the current ICC Men’s ODI Rankings for Batters. Lists that present Pakistan’s captain Babar Azam as a superior player to India’s Rohit Sharma, Shubman Gill, and Virat Kohli have not gone down well with former cricketers, who have therefore queried the validity of the ranking system.
Babar Azam is number one in the current ICC rankings as of April 2021, with 824 rating points. Not far behind is India’s captain, Rohit Sharma, who has a rating point of 765, and Shubman Gill and Virat Kohli, who are third and fourth with 763 and 746 rating points, respectively. These sorts of rankings may look clear to many people, but to Basit Ali, they seem rather dubious, and there might be more to them than is seen.
Responding to the rankings for himself and others, Basit Ali posted an incredulous waft on his YouTube channel. He suggested that the ICC was engineering Babar Azam’s position at the top to prevent further improvement in his cricketing ability. In his video, Basit Ali was not shy to make some claims, like asking the viewers to challenge the ranking system as a whole.
It did not even end with Babar Azam’s ranking; Ali also doubted Yousuf’s credentials. He also had problems with Shubman Gill’s place in the third number—according to the observer, the young Indian batsman’s presence in the upper ranks may not be entirely justified.
Amongst the many things that Basit Ali criticized Babar Azam for was the latter’s recent performance in the ODIs. He gave the example of Babar excluding himself from the one-day international team in the previous year’s World Cup and not even making a hundred. To this end, Ali also opined that Babar’s current form does not justify the position that the cricket has perched his status above other deserving batters who have excelled in the same bracket of the game in the same timeline.
Ali particularly named some of the world’s top batters, such as Rachin Ravindra, Quinton de Kock, Travis Head, and Virat Kohli, all of whom played brilliantly during the recently held World Cup. He said these players, who made centuries in the tournament, need to be ranked higher than Babar; his last century was against Nepal in the Asia Cup.
Maybe in a bid to take it too far, Basit Ali directly accused the ICC of being Babar Azem’s opponent. He even derisively suggested that the cricket governing body might be deliberately placing Babar atop to dissuade him from trying to improve. Along those lines, Ali made it clear that Babar knows that he cannot consider himself the best ODI batsman in the world now owing to the devastating display by other players.
As such, Basit Ali’s comments have elicited a debate among cricket fans and lovers, who want to know whether the ICC rankings are fair and, if not, on what basis the rankings are being assigned. On the positive side, the ranking system aims to present a player’s total worth and endurance by depicting them as an average of the player’s performance within a year or so. Still, Ali’s argument has raised awareness of the arbitrariness of such evaluations and the possibility of lapses.
This article first appeared on Total Apex Sports and was syndicated with permission.
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