ICC WTC 2021-23: Know the difference between the new and old points system

The International Cricket Council on Wednesday, 14 July, announced that the World Test Championship 2021-23 would have a different point system from the one used in 2019-21, the inaugural edition of the tournament. This time around, a win irrespective of the number of matches in a series would carry 12 points, a draw four and a tie six points. 

This system is different from the previous one in the sense that the previous edition utilised series as the benchmark for the points system. In the previous edition, every series had 120 points irrespective of it being a two or five matches series. What that did was, it made the value of matches uneven for every team. 

Thus to negate that unevenness, ICC adopted two changes - making every match of equal value and using the Percentage of Points (POP) system to make the points table simple and relevant. With POP in place, it wouldn’t matter if India play 20 Tests in the window and Bangladesh play only eight. 

To understand this let’s take an example that If India manages to win 12 of its 20 games and draws another two, its total point would 152 out of a total of 240. Thus in terms of POP, it would have 63.3 points. On the other hand, if Bangladesh wins six of its eight Tests and loses the rest, it would have 75 points. So in total, Bangladesh won half the matches as India, but still, it would have more points because of POP, thus playing fewer or more matches won’t affect a team’s points system in this year’s cycle.

ICC Acting Chief Executive Geoff Allardice, commenting on the new points system and the adoption of POP said, “This method also allowed us to compare the relative performance of teams at any time, regardless of how many matches they had played.”

As per the fixtures announced for the next cycle, the top nine teams, i.e. excluding Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Ireland from the 12 Test-playing nations, would play three home and three away Test series in the 2021-23 cycle. Matches played with non-WTC members wouldn’t be considered as part of the championship. 

While India begin its WTC 2021-23 journey with the five-match series against England away from home, the defending champions New Zealand would be welcoming South Africa, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka at home and play Pakistan, England and India away from home.