🌍 The Week in International Sport

Monday January 19th: test cricket team ratings, Futsal Euro 2026 and Lopušanova's record

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

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In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇦🇺 Australia leading the way in men’s test cricket

• 🇩🇪 Germany winning a European title in women’s indoor hockey

• 🇦🇹 Austria winning a European title in men’s indoor hockey

• 🇦🇺 Australia winning an Asia-Pacific title in men’s field lacrosse

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing Ukraine’s standing at Futsal Euro 2026

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Nela Lopušanová’s record-tying goal

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

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As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)

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🇦🇺 Australia lead the first edition of the men’s test cricket ratings

With the conclusion of the Ashes series between England and Australia earlier this month, men’s test cricket is now entering a fallow period: there will be no more matches in the World Test Championship until the start of June.

It’s a good time, then, to check in on the current competitive shape of the sport. The rating system I’ve settled on for this project was designed to be universally applicable, but it’s certainly tougher to adapt to some sports than to others. For test cricket, the ‘win rate’ that goes into each team rating remains self-explanatory; the ‘point share’ component, however, required a bit of thought. For now, I’ve settled on using each team’s average number of runs scored per wicket in a match as the inputs.

Consider the final test of the Ashes series: the away team scored 726 runs for the loss of 20 wickets, giving them an average of 36.3; the home side scored 728 for 15, for an average of 48.5. In this case, Australia’s ‘point share’ for the match would be 57%, or 48.5 / (48.5 + 36.3). It’s a crude measure, but rewards scoreboard dominance in the way I had hoped; in this first set of rankings, it is the reason that Australia (6.1) have pulled away from South Africa (5.8) at the top despite the teams’ similar win rates.

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🇩🇪 Germany win the 2026 Women’s EuroHockey Indoor Championship

At the elite level, indoor hockey — a six-a-side version of the traditional field sport — is effectively a European pursuit; South Africa (in 2023) are the only team from outside the continent to make the top four of any edition of the women’s World Cup.

Germany have just won a second straight European title, raising their team rating to 7.9 — well above the Czech Republic (5.9), who they beat in the final yesterday. Absent, however, were the Netherlands: three-time former world champions.

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🇦🇹 Austria win the 2026 Men’s EuroHockey Indoor Championship

In order to manage player workloads, the Dutch federation withdrew their (highly competitive) teams from international competition in indoor hockey in 2024. On the men’s side, the Netherlands had reached the World Cup final as recently as 2023.

In their absence, Austria (7.0) won last Sunday’s final against Poland (5.3) after a penalty shootout. At the semi-final stage, the runners-up did manage to upset the higher-rated hosts of the competition, Germany (6.7), by a single goal.

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🇦🇺 Australia win the 2026 Asia-Pacific Men’s Lacrosse Championship

First, a correction to Friday’s post: I will in fact be tracking three different sports administered by World Lacrosse as part of this project. In addition to field lacrosse — the traditional form of the sport — and box lacrosse, I will also be recording international results in lacrosse sixes; this is the version of the sport that will be played at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Apologies for the error!

International men’s field lacrosse has typically been dominated by teams from North America, but a couple of nations from Asia and Oceania gave creditable showings at the last World Championship in 2023: Australia finished fourth, and Japan fifth.

Both competed at the latest edition of the Asia-Pacific Championship, which recently concluded in New Zealand. Australia won all four of their matches to claim the title, raising their team rating to 6.0 along the way — still some way short of the USA (8.8).

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📊 Chart of the week: Are Ukraine the team to watch at Futsal Euro 2026?

The 2026 European championship of men’s international futsal begins later this week. The recent track record of Portugal (8.1) is comfortably better than any other competing nation, but Ukraine (5.6) also deserve to be treated as contenders.

After finishing in fourth at Futsal Euro 2022, they managed to win the third-place playoff at the 2024 World Cup — beating France to record the best placement of any European side. They did suffer a heavy 7-1 defeat to Argentina in the pool stage of that tournament, but only lost their semi-final against Brazil after a late penalty. It should be largely the same team on the pitch over the coming weeks, too: 10 of the 14 players named for a recent warm-up were also in the World Cup squad two years ago.

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⏪️ Highlight of the week: Nela Lopušanová’s record-tying goal

How special an ice hockey player is Nela Lopušanová? The 17-year-old from Slovakia equalled the individual scoring record at the U18 Women’s Worlds on Thursday, recording her 33rd career point in her 19th game at the tournament.

She’s done so despite her team winning only five times over this period, and conceding twice as many goals as they’ve scored in those games. Midway through their loss to Sweden, Lopušanová effortlessly controlled a pass with her right skate as she coasted into the offensive zone. The tempo then changed sharply: the winger accelerated towards the centre of the ice with a swift stride, and used the space created by a turning defender to snap a shot beyond the reach of the goalie’s blocker.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

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💭 What else I learned last week

• On LinkedIn, Omar Chaudhuri of consultancy Twenty First Group pointed out how much closer the England men’s test cricket team’s recent 4-1 series loss to Australia was by the underlying metrics: by average differential, the gap between the two sides was only around half as wide as it was in the equivalent five-match series that took place four years prior. In fact, per Chaudhuri, “it was a 50-75% improvement on the five other away defeats this century”.

• For the Sydney Morning Herald late last year, Iain Payten documented that at least 30 talented young rugby union players eligible for Australia are now contracted to professional clubs in France. It’s a particularly valuable type of athlete that’s in demand, too: “though many of the 30 weren’t first-choice stars of junior rep teams, their vast physical dimensions still made them targets…over half of the group are tight forwards”.

• For the Financial Times, Simon Kuper wrote about the extent to which the Africa Cup of Nations — the continent’s major men’s soccer competition, which held its latest final yesterday — is becoming a tournament of the diaspora. According to Kuper, “[a]bout a third of players in the tournament were born to African immigrant families outside Africa”. In this case, France are a major exporter of talent: “107 players in the tournament are French-born, about one in six”.

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The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday January 26th.

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