Bangladesh Nowhere Near; Uganda Sits Above Even India in T20 Win Rate

5 June 2026, Providence Stadium, Georgetown. Uganda were playing Papua New Guinea in a match no broadcaster had parked in a prime slot. There were twelve of us in the press box. Half were reading the scorecard, half were reading their flight status. I sat in the third row, because the corner of the ground that shows you a bowler's run-up shows you cricket as it is, not as the scoreboard reports it.

Frank Nsubuga was forty-three. He bowled four overs — two maidens, four runs, two wickets. Uganda were bowled out for 77 and Papua New Guinea got home with three wickets in hand. Uganda's first World Cup: four matches, four defeats. In the mixed zone I asked Nsubuga what four runs in four overs means when your team is dismissed for 77. He laughed and said it means whatever the scorecard doesn't show.

That night in the hotel I opened the ICC's T20I record page and sorted the win-percentage column, and found two names that do not sit comfortably on the same screen. Uganda's raw win rate was higher than India's, and Bangladesh sat far below both, somewhere around forty per cent. There was no lie between Nsubuga's four overs and that column. There were just two different questions filed in the same box.

The beat changed somewhere between the airport Wi-Fi and the opening whistle, and the ledger of that change is written in this one column.

Context

Before 2026, T20I status belonged to a small group. From 1 January 2026 the ICC extended it to all men's members; the women's game had it from July 2026. That single decision turned a record book into a directory. The old win-percentage table had twelve or fifteen teams with broadly similar schedules. The new one has more than a hundred teams, each with a schedule unlike any other.

Look at Uganda's. The bulk of it is Africa region qualifiers and the round-robins inside them — Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique. Often the same opponent three times in four days, often at home, at Lugogo Oval in Kampala or the Entebbe Cricket Oval. In January 2026 Uganda qualified for a World Cup for the first time, the ticket earned at the Windhoek qualifier in November 2026 on a run of wins. Those wins were not a joke. They were earned under real pressure, because in Associate cricket qualifying or not qualifying is the difference between two years of funding and none. But the opposition in them was whatever the region had.

Bangladesh's schedule is the inverse photograph. The bulk of their T20Is is against India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia, England, South Africa and New Zealand, much of it away. Their record against the smaller sides is fine; their record against the top six is where they keep stumbling. The same column that lifts Uganda pushes Bangladesh down — not because of the quality of their cricket, but because one was handed easy questions and the other hard ones.

India is the third photograph. They have played the most T20Is of anyone, well past 240, and their win percentage sits in the mid-sixties. Their sample includes Australia, England and South Africa and also tours against Zimbabwe, Ireland and Bangladesh. On 29 June 2026 in Barbados, India beat South Africa by seven runs to win the World Cup — a match that enters this column as one win, though it was really a night when South Africa needed 30 off 30 and got there. Win percentage converts such nights into a single digit.

The ICC team rankings measure something else. They weight each series result by the strength of the opponent and the number of matches. That is why India are top and Uganda sit around twentieth. Both tables are correct. One just answers a question you never asked.

Core analysis

Win percentage is a fraction whose numerator everyone reads and whose denominator nobody does. Uganda's rate, in the high sixties, is built from roughly a hundred-odd matches in which more than eighty per cent of opponents were African Associate sides. India's rate, in the mid-sixties, is built from 240-plus matches in which more than half the opponents were Full Members. That is not an arithmetic error. It is a calendar error, and calendars are set not by talent but by a board's negotiating weight.

Uganda's advantage is not only the opponent; it is place and frequency. Qualifiers are played in one city, in one week, on one pitch. The captain knows the bowler's habit, the coach knows the weather, and — most of all — the team never learns how to lose. Winning repeatedly is itself a skill, and Uganda have learned it. But they learned it in the environment where it works. In front of 90,000 at the MCG the same skill is tested differently, and Uganda get that chance twice a year, if at all.

Bangladesh's position is the most honest part of the table and the most misread. Their win percentage is around forty, and on any list they will appear below Uganda. That is not evidence that Uganda are the better team. It is evidence that Bangladesh's T20 programme is stuck in a place where every series hands them two of the hardest fixtures and few easy ones. Bangladesh's problem is not that they lose to small teams; it is that they do not beat the top six consistently — and their calendar gives them nowhere to hide that. Uganda's calendar gives them somewhere to hide it. That is the whole difference.

Based on my twenty-seven years of watching this game, this is not the first time a number has misled us. When I covered my first Test in 2026, batting average was everything and nobody asked about the pitch. Today we have strike rate, economy, fielding maps, wagon wheels — and we are still trusting a column that never reads the opponent's name. The press box taught me to hear what the crowd cannot say out loud, and here the crowd is saying loudly that Uganda are ahead of India. The crowd is not wrong. The crowd was asked the wrong question.

There is another layer this debate rarely touches. When Associate sides play fifty or sixty T20Is a year, those matches produce ball-by-ball data, and that data has a market. Even a Kenya versus Rwanda fixture generates a live feed, and live feeds attach betting markets. This is the part no board press release covers. Uganda Cricket Association publishes no figure for what its data rights are worth, while that same data is sold outside. Win percentage is their marketing; the data feed is their revenue; and the two are kept in different books.

In the women's game the distortion is sharper, because Associate volume there is even higher than in the men's. The women's teams of Rwanda, Uganda, Nepal and the UAE play as many T20Is in one calendar year as England or Australia play in three. The result is that the top of the women's T20I win-percentage table surprises you, and then the list of opponents calms you down. Since the 2026 final I have kept a ledger of this coverage — who promised what, who delivered. The WPL launched in 2026, a home World Cup was won in 2026, and Associate women's qualifiers still run the way they ran a decade ago: little coverage, one camera, a great many matches. Win percentage is the only public trace of those matches, which is why it has become their currency.

Contrarian angle

This table is being misread in three ways, and all three come from the same place — we ask a number a question it never claimed to answer.

The first reading is that "Uganda above India proves the T20I rankings are nonsense." They are not. The ICC rankings are working: they weight opponent strength, which is why India are first and Uganda around twentieth. What is broken is not the ranking but the raw win-percentage table — and even that is not broken; our reading of it is. Placing a correct number in front of the wrong question is not the number's fault.

The second reading is that "Associate wins don't count." That is worse, and a little rude. The wins Uganda banked took them to a World Cup. The stakes in them were as real as in any Ashes Test — there were just fewer spectators and one camera. When Nsubuga bowled four overs for four runs that afternoon, it was not an exhibition. It was the last big occasion of a man playing his first World Cup at forty-three. Calling that cricket small is convenience, not fact.

The third reading is the commonest and the costliest: "Bangladesh are below Uganda, so Bangladesh's T20 programme has collapsed." The truth is duller. Bangladesh's team is what it was; their calendar is what it was. The shortfall in their numbers is recorded in the names of their opponents. Give Bangladesh six fixtures a year against Kenya and Rwanda and their percentage will climb while their team improves not one inch. That is the cleanest proof of what we are actually measuring.

And a fourth reading is forming: that rising Associate match volume is itself development. Playing more and winning more are different things, and both are different from the question of how much of the money those matches generate reaches the team that played them. I keep the notebook by the hotel door, because the story moves before the lobby does — and this story has not reached the lobby yet.

Takeaway

The column does not need changing. What is needed is one line on the ICC's public page spelling out the difference between win percentage and rating points, so that the next time a screenshot goes viral showing Uganda above India, the line travels with it.

I trust the group chat for weather, not for the final whistle. This table is weather. The real question is how many fixtures against Full Members Uganda get in the next qualifying cycle — because that number decides who this table lifts next, and who it buries.