The Hindu : Sport / Cricket : India slips to fourth in Test rankings

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Wednesday, Jul 05, 2006

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Sport - Cricket

India slips to fourth in Test rankings

Dubai: India may have won its first series in the Caribbean for 35 years, beating the West Indies 1-0 over four matches, but it has not stopped Rahul Dravid's side slipping down the LG ICC Test Championship table.

India has lost two rating points and a place in that table and now sits in fourth spot, below Pakistan, and the reason for that demotion is that the side failed to live up to its pre-series ranking.

Dravid's men began the tour a massive 39 rating points and five places ahead of the West Indies, and the 1-0 margin did not justify their superior rating.

India's failure to do that has cost it rating points, dropping it to 109 (the same as Pakistan) and that was enough to see it slip below Inzamam-ul-Haq's side when the table was recalculated to three decimal places.

India is now three points behind second-placed England and 22 points behind leader Australia.

Windies still eighth

The West Indies remains in eighth position but its performance has seen it gain two points.

Brian Lara's side now has 74 points, 23 adrift of Sri Lanka and New Zealand in sixth and seventh places respectively.

Captain Dravid was outstanding in the decisive Test of the series in Jamaica and he remains in second place in the LG ICC Player Rankings for Test batsmen.

Dravid is now just 10 rating points short of his best-ever mark and only one player, Australia's Ricky Ponting, lies ahead of him in the list.

Dravid is one of two India batsmen in the top 20, along with Virender Sehwag, who lies 16th. Further down the list the absent Sachin Tendulkar, recovering from shoulder surgery, is in joint 21st place along with the West Indies' Shivnarine Chanderpaul, while V.V.S. Laxman is joint 28th alongside another West Indies batsman, Ramnaresh Sarwan, and Wasim Jaffer is 65th.

Lara in 10th place

Lara is in 10th spot, his lowest Test ranking for five years, after a modest series. He is the only West Indies batsman in the top 20 with Chanderpaul slipping four spots while Chris Gayle is 24th.

Each side has one player in the top 10 of bowlers' rankings with India's Anil Kumble retaining his eighth spot while Corey Collymore ventures into the top 10 for the first time, finding himself up seven places to 10th in the list.

Irfan Pathan, who played just one Test in the series for India, is 15th while Harbhajan Singh, who captured five-wicket hauls in each of the last two Tests, is up two places to joint 22nd, alongside New Zealand's Chris Martin.

Munaf Patel is in 43rd place, S. Sreesanth has risen 14 places to 46th, his first time in the top 50, and Jerome Taylor, who impressed for the home side, has climbed 30 places to joint 61st, and now sits next to South Africa's Andrew Hall.

With a player losing one per cent of his rating for every Test he misses, Pathan has dropped down one place in the LG ICC Player Rankings for Test all-rounders and now lies sixth. — PTI

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