How dominant is the Aussie women’s side?

Following a shock semi-final exit to India in the 2017 one-day international (ODI) World Cup, the Australian women’s cricket team hit the reset button. And how. In the next five years, they won two World T20 titles, a women’s ODI championship, 40 of 42 ODIs played including a worldrecord 26 on the trot, the Ashes, and the 2022 ODI World Cup last week.

It has also raised the question of where does this Meg Lanning-led team’s dominance fit in the short history of women’s cricket, or even how its dominance compares against that of the great West Indian and Australian men’s sides. The short answer: Meg Lanning’s Australia are worthy of their achievements, though statistically still not the best the world has ever seen.

For this analysis, we relied on a derivative of the ELO ratings popularised by chess. Named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor, the system not only considers match results but also the relative quality of the opposition. Thus, it rewards teams more when they beat stronger opposition, as opposed to weaker opposition. And it also enables some comparison over time. In men’s Tests, three teams stand out since 1975 for constructing defining periods of dominance. These are Clive Lloyd’s West Indies (1982 to 1988), Steve Waugh’s Australia (1999 to 2003) and Ricky Ponting’s Australia (2004 to 2008). Chart 1 shows how each of these teams broke away from the rest. Each did it over several years. Each raised the ELO bar. The peak ELO rating of that West Indian side was 1,288 (June 1986). Waugh’s Australian side raised it to 1,311 (January 2001) and Ponting’s side raised it further to 1,485 in December 2007, the highest till date.