ICC Test Championship

ICC Test Championship

ICC Test Championship logo
Administrator	International Cricket Council
Format	Test cricket
First tournament	2003
Last tournament	ongoing
Tournament format	notional (ongoing points accumulation through all matches played)
Number of teams	10
Current champion	India (120 points)
Most successful	Australia (83 months)

The ICC Test Championship is an international competition run by the International Cricket Council in the sport of cricket for the 10 teams that play Test cricket. The competition is notional in the sense that it is simply a ranking scheme overlaid on all international matches that are otherwise played as part of regular Test cricket scheduling with no consideration of home or away status.

In essence, after every Test series, the two teams involved receive points based on a mathematical formula. Each team's points total is divided by their total number of matches played to give a 'rating', and the Test-playing teams are ranked by order of rating (this can be shown in a table).

A drawn match between higher and lower rated teams will benefit the lower-rated team at the expense of the higher-rated team. An 'average' team that wins as often as it loses while playing a mix of stronger and weaker teams should have a rating of 100.

The International Cricket Council awards a trophy, the ICC Test Championship mace, to the team holding the highest rating. The mace is transferred whenever a new team moves to the top of the rating list. The team that is top of the ratings table on 1 April each year also wins a cash prize, currently $1 million.

India are currently the highest-ranked team in the ICC Test Championship, having taken over at the top in October 2016 when they won their Test series 3-0 with New Zealand.

The ICC provides ratings for the end of each month back to June 2003. The teams that have successively held the highest rating since that date, by whole month periods, are:

Since the ICC officially began ranking teams in 2003, Australia has dominated as it had done so in Test cricket since around 1995. However, from 2009, several teams (Australia, South Africa, India, England and Pakistan) have competed for the top positions.

The ICC recently applied its current rating system to results since 1952 providing ratings for the end of each month back to 1952 further indicating Australia's historical dominance in Test Cricket with the most consecutive months ranked first (95 months) from September 2001 to July 2009, the highest number of months ranked first (326 months) and the highest rating (143). The table only begins from 1952 as prior to this date, there is not enough data available due to the infrequency of matches and the small number of competing teams in the earlier periods.