Until that point, the crown honouring the best Test team in the world was merely a theoretical one, although the ICC Test rankings helped to an extent. Now, most Tests feeds into one league table, with a winner-takes-all clash at the end of it. New Zealand claimed the first title at Southampton in 2021.

But what would an all-time World Test Championship table look like?

It’s not as silly an idea as it sounds. The current WTC table is ordered by PCT (percentage of points won per points contested), used to give a fair ranking despite each team playing a different amount of games. Using this, with 60 points for a win, 20 points for a draw, and 30 points for a tie, we can calculate an all-time World Test Championship table easily, even though some teams have played vastly differing numbers of games to others.

The other issue is deciding which games to include. It makes sense to only include nine teams, as per the current competition. But should Bangladesh, currently in the top tier, or Zimbabwe, a Test nation for longer, be included? There are arguments for both, and so we’ve put together the tables featuring each of them.

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If you include neither of them, the top eight remains the same. But intriguingly, if you include both, South Africa leapfrog England into second by a fraction of a decimal.

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Still, even though less than 25 PCT separates top and eighth in every variation, the order is almost set, and it’s revealing in several ways. New Zealand are rooted in eighth, demonstrating just how impressive their current team is, justifying their status as perhaps the best team the land of the long white cloud has produced.

The West Indies, despite supplying one of Test cricket’s most dominant teams in the 1980s, are languishing down in sixth place, while it’s Pakistan who edge India in fourth, by only just over 0.5 percent in the table excluding Zimbabwe and Bangladesh.

England have only rarely been the undisputed best side in the world, but their current struggles are also out of the ordinary, with their spot in the top three showing that they are generally a competitive side.

But it’s perhaps no surprise that Australia, winners of the first-ever Test match and the current world No.1s, take top spot relatively comfortably. They are the only team with more than 50 PCT, and the gap between them and second place is larger than the gap between any other two positions in the top eight.

Also notable is that Australia’s PCT is still low by modern standards. Partly this is down to teams being able to put on strong runs of form over a two-year period that can’t be maintained across all time. But also it shows how draws, which only give 20 points, have gone out of the game to an extent.