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ASKED how he felt about literary prizes, Kingsley Amis once said: “Well, they’re all right if you win.”

It’s easy to imagine the group of teams circling around the top of the ICC Test match rankings feeling the same.

Like literary prizes, the criteria for victory seems arbitrary and hard to understand, and anyway “the best” – it’s subjective, isn’t it?

We don’t need algorithms to tell us when a truly great team emerges.

The West Indies of the late 1970s and early ’80s and the Australian dynasties that succeeded them didn’t need a mace and a cheque to validate their efforts.

Their greatness bestowed itself upon the game, their defeats in some strange way more memorable than their victories; rare, valiant proof that they were (sometimes) human.

Did anyone care about rankings as they watched India play Australia in 2001, or the Ashes of 2005? No, they did not.

The battle itself was the thing, and it needed no further context.

We live now in less certain times. Has there been a sadder sight than West Indies playing India in a four-Test series before almost no one, the great Viv Richards commentating on a mismatch in an empty stadium named after himself, while the last days of the CPL burned onwards towards a packed-out final tie contested by the real stars of Caribbean cricket? It appeared symbolically bad.

Around the same time, Pakistan, a team that has not played a home international match since 2009, won a Test at Lord’s, but then subsided to defeat in the next two games, in Manchester and Birmingham.

New Zealand went to Zimbabwe and illustrated the gap between a side in the middle of the rankings and the team at the bottom (Zimbabwe are so far adrift that eight of the other Test-playing nations are closer in points to the No. 1 spot than they are to tenth place). Australia, officially the best, went to Sri Lanka, who had just been roundly beaten in England, and were humiliated.

New Zealand hopped on a plane to South Africa and found themselves trying to play a series out of season, as wet as West Indies and India ultimately became.

The pivotal moments of these few weeks came at The Oval, when Pakistan, their glorious fervour calmly channelled by the ageless Misbah-ul-Haq, somehow raised themselves up once more and defeated England.

Suddenly all of these random, unconnected, bilaterally contracted events had an overarching narrative that could knit them together, and that narrative was the Test match rankings.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog about “box-set cricket”, the way that tournaments like the IPL, the Big Bash and the CPL fit with modern life, fulfilling the urge to binge on one thing for a brief period.

Their self-containment seemed like an intrinsic and obvious part of their appeal, as did their comparative rarity – they may appear ubiquitous but each happens only once a year.

They contrasted with the sprawling, soap-opera narrative of Test cricket, which didn’t have any obvious entry point or definitive conclusion.

That’s not necessarily a negative. As the great Gideon Haigh puts it in the documentary Death of a Gentleman, “T20 cricket needs something to be shorter than.”

Test cricket has accompanied me through my life, changing with geological slowness but changing nonetheless, its storylines inexhaustible and self-renewing.

And yet something that takes decades to impose its form needs impetus from outside forces, the shock of the new, whether it be Kerry Packer, the driving force of TV money, or the nonsense of the Big Three.

By fluke, all of those Test series going on in the last month provided it.

This wasn’t quite box-set cricket but it was a happy coalescing that made for a compelling story with a wonderful outcome for Pakistan and the game as a whole.

How invigorating and inspiring for Test cricket to have a team at No. 1 that has never been there before, and that has fought almost overwhelming odds to do so.

But it has happened by chance. The rambling, unfocused ranking system can’t claim credit, or to have “solved” the problem of giving narrative shape to the uncoordinated, top-heavy mess that is the Future Tours Programme.

It is not a Test championship and it can’t address the gap between the top teams and the bottom, which suggests a two-division system may work better.

It doesn’t provide more regular cricket, or a ladder up for, whisper it, more Test playing nations.

Instead, it is proof that this endlessly unfolding story can have its way stations, points at which we stop and reset and allow someone to take in the view from the top.

As Misbah put it this week, “For us, the No. 1 ranking is not a destination but part of a journey.”

At the grand old age of 64, and with his 17th novel The Old Devils, Amis finally won something – the big one, in fact – the Booker Prize.

His surprise and delight were genuine, and the greater for having waited so long. Amis drank in the moment and the view.

Pakistan should enjoy doing the same. For once, their story has been properly and spectacularly framed. — ESPNCricinfo