The main focus of the Reliance ICC Player Rankings is to determine who the peakperformers in world cricket
are, be they in Test cricket or in the
One-Day International format of the game.However, as we enter the Chinese Year of the Rabbit, we examine the other
end of the scale - the true 'rabbits' with the bat - those batsmen who
can often be found lurking at number eleven praying they are not required to make it
to the crease with a bat in their hands.
Firstly, we need to set some parameters. It is relatively straightforward to discover the players who have achieved the highest number of Ratings points, but how should we judge the lowest? A player who debuts and fails to score has a total of zero points, but that isn't really a fair way of measuring his lowest point. So we have two points of reference in order to help us discover the true 'rabbits' of the world game.
Secondly, it is probably only really fair to limit our investigations to the Test arena. This is due to the fact that in the ODI game, players batting down the order only have a limited amount of time in which to make an impression, and often they fall early on in the quest for quick runs. In addition, they bat far more irregularly than their top-order colleagues.
In order to have a 'full' rating, a player has to have batted at least forty times in his career. To date, a total of 551 players have managed this, so more than enough to be getting on with. They range from Sachin Tendulkar with his 290 innings - 51 of which he has converted into centuries - to the fifteen batsman including George Headley and Dilhara Fernando to have batted on exactly forty occasions in their Test careers.
Of these 551 players it will probably come as no surprise to discover the names of the players with the best and worst batting averages. Don Bradman's average of 99.94 is more than 50% better than anyone else, and at the other end of the spectrum, Chris Martin's current average of 2.53 is comfortably worse than anyone else. In fact he would need to score 71 in his next innings to edge ahead of Bhagwat Chandrasekhar.
Returning to the Ratings, whereas when we look at the high flyers we examine their highest-ever points totals, here we are interested in their lowest points totals, once the player has qualified for a full Rating. So - how do they stack up? Here are the lowest batting Ratings achieved once a player has played the required forty Test innings:
