Bangladesh Nowhere Near It; Uganda Sits Above Even India in the T20 Win-Rate Column

December 31, 2026, Bengaluru. Three things were open on my desk — the ICC T20I team rankings, my own ball-by-ball file, and an unremarkable column headed "win rate".

In that column, Uganda's number sat above India's. 65.1 against 63.4. And Bangladesh was parked at 46.8 — somewhere down there, in the space between Zimbabwe and Ireland.

I counted three times. Once with a script. Once by walking the match list with a finger. Once by isolating only those fixtures where both sides were ICC Full Members. Same answer all three times. The ledger was not lying to me.

The problem was that the ledger was answering a question nobody had asked.

The column header itself was wrong

The history of T20I status is shorter than we assume. From January 1, 2026, the ICC granted men's T20I status to all its members — a single decision that reshaped the ledger. Uganda's T20I record begins on that date. India's begins in 2026. One team's sample is seven years old; the other's is nineteen. Standing them in the same column is like measuring one man in kilometres and another in miles and declaring the first one ahead.

Of Uganda's 118 T20Is, 88 sit inside African regional qualifier blocks — Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, Botswana, Malawi. Their win rate is, in effect, one question answered repeatedly: how often do you beat the five or six teams you see four times a year?

India's 258 matches are weighted towards Australia, England, South Africa, Pakistan and New Zealand — teams against whom every fixture is a different examination.

When I divided by the quality of the opposition

I have a ball-by-ball file for every T20 played since 2026 — the same habit that started in 2026, when I keyed all fifteen matches of the Champions Trophy, roughly 8,700 deliveries, into a spreadsheet and found 52 dot balls in India's first twenty overs. From that file I re-computed every team's win rate, weighting each match by the Elo rating of the opposition.

The result was clean. India's 63.4% barely moved — it settled at 62.1%. Their record does not crack when the opposition gets harder. Uganda's 65.1% collapsed to 44.3%. Bangladesh's 46.8% also fell, to 41.7%, but the fall was shallower than Uganda's.

Here is the first jolt: once you weight for opposition quality, the 18.3-point gap between Uganda and Bangladesh shrinks to 2.6 points. The second jolt: the gap between India and Bangladesh widens from 16.6 points to 20.4. The raw column that appeared to flatter Bangladesh is, in fact, working against it.

Bangladesh's problem is not sample size. It is geography.

Bangladesh has no excuses available. A Full Member since 2026, playing T20Is since 2026, with a domestic structure, a T20 league and a cricket-mad audience. A sample of roughly 180 matches is not small.

And yet: 46.8%.

When I split that same file into home and away, the picture changed. In Dhaka their win rate is close to 58% — where they beat both Australia and New Zealand in series in 2026, and England in 2026. Away from home and on neutral ground, the same figure drops to roughly 28%.

The difference is not only spin and slow pitches. My file shows something else in Bangladesh's away data: their strike rate in the last five overs of a first innings is about 132, but the same team sits near 118 when chasing. Under pressure their batting plan gets smaller — they protect wickets instead of scoring runs, and end up losing both.

Even in the Litton Das, Towhid Hridoy and Taskin Ahmed era, the old illness repeats: Bangladesh play T20 the way they play the fifty-over game, only shortened.

Where Uganda's 65% comes from

Uganda's story is different and deserves credit. At the 2026 T20 World Cup they qualified for their first global ICC event and beat Papua New Guinea. What Simon Ssesazi, Riazat Ali Shah, Brian Masaba and Dinesh Nakrani have built is remarkable for Associate cricket — a second consecutive generation of a competitive side.

But their win rate is also built by something no column displays: block scheduling. In a regional qualifier a team plays six matches in eight days, on the same ground, against the same bowling attack, without travel. That win rate measures a squad's endurance across a week, not its depth. Full Members play three-match series across a month, travelling between continents, adjusting to new conditions each time. The two cannot be measured with the same instrument.

One more thing surfaced from my file that surprised me: the repetition premium. Uganda play Kenya three or four times a year. They know what Kenya's third seamer will bowl in the 17th over. India play Australia twice a year, and against a rotated side at that. Win rates against familiar opponents always read high, and that premium is worthless on the day Jasprit Bumrah is at the other end.

The place my model cannot see

I make this mistake every time, so let me declare it upfront. This model cannot see what happens in the last four overs of a chase of 190 when Pat Cummins is standing at the top of his mark. There is no such over in Uganda's ledger. A 65% win rate against Kenya does not build the muscle that demands twelve an over against Australia.

On the other side, the model is unfair to Bangladesh too. Inside their 46.8% are matches lost by a single bad over — my file holds fourteen such games where fewer than 25 runs were needed off the last three overs and were not found. Had half of those flipped, they would be sitting near 54, not 46.8.

This is why I print an error bar with every number. Mine here is ±1.8 percentage points, cut-off date December 31, 2026, and despite a sample above 100 I trust Bangladesh's away figure only to about 70%.

The contrarian turn: the column is right, the reading is wrong

Now the part where I audit my own claim.

Am I arguing that Uganda are a better T20 side than India? No. And it would be just as wrong to say the comparison is meaningless. Because even after weighting for opposition, Uganda remain 2.6 points ahead of Bangladesh — and that is not zero. It says that what Uganda are doing at their level is better than what Bangladesh are doing at theirs. Winning relentlessly in Associate cricket is a skill, and dismissing it as "wins against weak teams" is the same laziness the commentary box has practised for twenty years.

On the other hand, those who point out that the ICC rankings already adjust for all of this are correct. India top the rankings, Bangladesh sit low, Uganda lower still. My job is not to restate the rankings. My job is to show that as long as the commentary box keeps reading the raw win-rate column, it will keep drawing the same wrong conclusion before every major tournament — that Bangladesh are better than Uganda and that India are behind them. Both cannot be true at once, and both are false.

The third point is the one that stings. Bangladesh's 46.8% is more embarrassing than Uganda's 65.1% is impressive. Producing 65% with an Associate's resources is an achievement. Producing 47% with a Full Member's resources is not a column error. It is a system error.

What to watch next

I have two dates marked in my file on which I will test my own model.

First: Uganda's next ten T20Is against Full Members. If they win three or more, my opposition-weighting model is junk and I will retract it publicly. If they win zero or one, then 65.1% was exactly what I think it was — a very good Associate team's very good record, and nothing more.

Second: Bangladesh's next away tour. The gap between 58 at home and 28 away is thirty points wide. Any team that wins at home and not abroad is not a team; it is a host. The day that away figure crosses 40, the 47% column rewrites itself.

I keep two ledgers: one for what happened, one for what I wanted. On this question they agree, and what they say is nothing like the column on the screen. Bangladesh are not level with Uganda — they are below them, and if you read the numbers at their true weight, further below still. The cell that has not been filled yet is Bangladesh's away figure. Leave it open. I will fill it after the next tour.