Oh woe and pestilence, Australia stand to cede a shining crown. For want of Marcus Stoinis nailing one more six, a kingdom has been lost. If Sri Lanka succumb to South Africa one more time this Friday night – and one is an anvil, the other gravity – the veld fanciers will grab the world No1 ranking in one-day cricket from the wattle merchants. Not that South African uniforms aren’t also green and gold, but you get the drift. Dethroned, on the one hand! Champions, on the other. Except there will be no wailing. Garments will not be rent. Teeth will remain ungnashed. Because who, we may ask with rhetorical intent, will care?

Principally no one cares because no one has a clue what’s going on. The ICC rankings are not a garbage fire; they’re a photograph of a garbage fire made into a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. And you have no reading glasses and a severe case of the DTs. The system can’t use anything so absurdly simple as a number of points for winning a game, because every team plays different numbers of games in different time spans. Then there’s the need to give less of a boost for beating low-ranked opponents, and more for an underdog win, recognising that not all wins are equal.

The string of calculations required to achieve this looks like something the aforementioned dog has smeared down the hallway carpet after getting into the stock pot. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve never known how these numbers work; having asked half a dozen accomplished cricket writers for an explanation, none of them did either. Once more into the breach then, and after nine days of study, a bucket of lark’s tongues, and a dozen backward rotations around the Pillar of Eldar in the silver light of the last summer moon, I think I’ve got some grasp on how the thing is put together. Like most instructions delivered by ancient rune, I still have no idea why.

For one, there’s an inbuilt reward for not playing. Ratings are the number of points divided by the number of games. Just as Adam Voges should have retired during that Wellington Test when his batting average stuck its head up above 100, teams with good ratings can keep them by avoiding contests. Australia could lose top spot to South Africa, but if the Aussies had refused to play the wily Proteas, they could have occupied No1 in comfort.

Teams get their opponent’s rating number plus 50 points for a win, or that number minus 50 points for a loss. Unless the two teams are 40 or more ratings points apart, in which case the match points are based on the team’s own rating. The high-ranked team in such a contest only adds 10 points for a win but subtracts 90 for a loss, while the low-ranked team inverts that bonus or penalty.

Which sounds great: underdog teams rewarded for knocking off the big dogs, hell yeah, go the Mighty Ducks. But the upshot is that, say, the historic and revolutionary event that would be Afghanistan (rating of 52) winning a match against Australia (rating of 118) would net the new boys 142 points, while the comparatively normal occurrence of Australia beating South Africa (118) would be worth 168 points.

That’s before we even get to the disparity towards the bottom of the ladder, where in the current rankings period of nearly four years, Afghanistan have played 26 games and Ireland 20 to Australia’s 61 and South Africa’s 56.

Australia, for instance, has no incentive to ever play Afghanistan, because a win would net only 128 points, but a slip-up would deliver a punishing 28 points. In theory – say the West Indies (rating of 86) lost to Ireland (42) – it should even be possible for a team to get negative points. With the points total then divided by an increased number of games, the losing side’s rating plummets. Why would higher-ranked teams take the risk of a slip-up when neither rankings nor finances offer any worthwhile reward?

Obviously plenty of people at the ICC are aware of these problems, though it hasn’t extended to their own website having a working rankings calculator, or displaying the decimals that separate apparently tied teams. Changes to the ODI system are well underway, although they could still be axed if India’s cricket board doesn’t get the sport’s income chopped into portions it deems suitably favourable. Right now the BCCI is in headless-chook phase after the Supreme Court of India decapitated its administration, but that won’t last forever.

Under the proposed regime teams will play four series of three games per year, spanning a dozen opponents over three years. Games will be worth points in a normal league table, as each team plays every other team the same number of times. The duration is still different to most sports: 2019’s gun side could be 2021’s shadow of former glory. But, at least it’s a system where the best-performed teams will be clear and quantifiable, instead of the current maelstrom where no one seems to know how or why anything has happened.

While the current standings scarcely seem to matter, cricketers playing for them are materially affected. Australia’s players get pay bonuses based on series wins and staying at No1. Administrators made that deal, then signed off on schedules that undermined the ability to fulfil it. Twice recently, teams have gone overseas while having to rest key players. The regulars aren’t short of a buck, but to have your pay packet ride on development team-mates would be galling nonetheless. Did we need two Chappell-Hadlee series in two months? Why was a South Africa trip that no one can remember jammed into October? The New Zealand loss was the final blow, but only the prior 5-0 pasting meant the Proteas were even within reach.

Come the weekend, South Africa will seize that spot. Or, Australia will retain it even as cricketers sleep in their beds. No parades will be arranged, no medals minted, and if criticism is dealt for a slip, it will be long on splutter and short on comprehension. The players will shrug and get on with their careers. None of it will matter very much at all. Reform could not be more welcome. Let’s get the deal done.