Jansen's Double No.1 and Abhishek's Return: the ICC Rankings Are a Ledger, Not a Form Certificate

Marco Jansen took 5/33 in the first innings of the second Test, then walked out at No. 8 and made 85. Ten wickets across the two Tests. On a scorecard that is a good all-round series — the kind that happens four or five times a season and is forgotten inside a fortnight.

The ICC's weekly table gave the same numbers a second life. Jansen now sits at No. 1 among Test bowlers and No. 1 among Test all-rounders, two separate calculations landing in the same release.

In the same update, at the other end of the sport, Abhishek Sharma returned to No. 1 among T20I batters after 113 off 38 balls. The word “returned” matters: Ishan Kishan had gone past him in July, and Ishan's injury has opened the slot Abhishek now occupies.

One release, two stories, moving in opposite directions. That is the point where the table stops being a scoreboard and becomes a document you read the way an accountant reads a ledger.

What the table actually measures

The ICC does not publish one ranking. It publishes a set of them, and they do not move at the same speed or by the same arithmetic.

Batting and bowling ratings run on a rolling weighted average. Every innings generates points — wickets, runs, the strength of the opposition, the state of the match — and those points are folded into a window of roughly three to four years, with older performances decaying and the newest ones carrying the most weight. The table is therefore a snapshot of recent velocity, redrawn every week, rather than a verdict on a career.

The all-rounder table is built differently. It is, in essence, a player's batting rating added to his bowling rating. There is no separate instrument measuring all-round craft; two numbers are summed and given a single name. That detail changes the entire reading, because an additive metric rewards competence on both sides at once and quietly removes the requirement to be extraordinary on either.

Then there is the mixing of formats. This one update carries a South Africa–Australia Test series, an India–New Zealand T20I series and an ODI tri-series in Pakistan and the UAE. A reader skimming the headline can end up weighing a Test 5/33 against a T20I 113 on the same scale. The two have no mathematical relationship at all.

And a fourth thing, the one rankings copy usually skips: the straight line it draws from performance to table to headline. One innings, one movement, one story. In practice the table does not answer to a single innings; it answers to an average in which the newest innings is only the last entry. That is why a large score sometimes leaves a player exactly where he was, and a modest one can move him up.

I followed the paper trail — the ICC release, the scorecards, the season lists — until it turned into a single table. The rows with the most space in it belonged to players who did not get a line in any headline.

Jansen's double: the headline is two Tests, the arithmetic is two years

The copy says Jansen reached No. 1 on the back of ten wickets and an 85. The arithmetic says something else.

If the all-rounder ranking is a sum, both halves must already have been high for a long time for the sum to reach the summit. One innings of 85 is spread across many entries in a rolling average; on its own it does not push anyone to the top. Jansen's bowling rating was already near the peak. His batting rating, for a man who bats at eight, has been unusually high for a while. The sum produces the summit, and the sum is far older than two Tests.

A bowling No. 1 is a statement about recent form. An all-rounder No. 1 is a statement about a two-year average. Same player, same week, two titles with different birth dates. The headline collapsed them into one.

My spreadsheet runs three columns on Jansen — season's best, championship history, wickets per innings across the last two seasons. This week I had to add a fourth: the calendar. South Africa plays fewer Tests than the other major sides, which means each of their bowler's matches carries more weight than it would for a man playing twelve a year. A good match pulls the average up sharply, and there is no fixture next month to drag it back down. The low-volume bowler climbs fast and slips slowly.

Watching the second Test last week, the most interesting thing was not Jansen's bowling. It was his running between the wickets — a No. 8 moving with the ease of a top-order player. The all-rounder ranking captures exactly that, which is precisely why it moves so slowly.

Abhishek's No. 1: the mathematics of a small sample

T20I batting runs in the opposite gear. Limited-overs samples are thin, so each innings carries more weight, and 113 off 38 balls is close to the maximum score an innings can generate. One such knock is enough to move the top slot, especially when the two innings before it read 29 and 27 — not failures, but not summit material either.

The real story sits where the table does not look. Abhishek slipped off the top in July, and the place opened up for him through Ishan Kishan's injury. Staying at No. 1 in T20I cricket requires matches as much as runs, and matches require fitness. The sequence is clear: injury vacated a slot, performance filled it. The standard reading reverses that order and credits the runs alone.

Nor is a 113 off 38 proof that Abhishek is the best T20I batter in the world. It is proof that his game profile suits a metric weighted heavily towards strike rate and per-innings impact.

The rest: six countries, three formats, one release

Temba Bavuma's 179 lifts his place on the Test batting list. Harry Brook's climb runs on England's crowded calendar — more innings, more chances, and the same pressure on every poor one. Scott Boland and Simon Harmer are the two most instructive names in the update: both play selectively, so each good match lands hard on the average. That is sample size, not standard.

On the ODI side sit Shaheen Shah Afridi and Azmatullah Omarzai, from a tri-series being played in Pakistan and the UAE — neutral and semi-neutral conditions that the points column does not record directly, though conditions change performance and performance changes points. Starc, Henry, Robinson, Bumrah, Jadeja: the top of the bowling chart is congested, and a six- or seven-point gap can flip inside three innings.

The consensus: rankings reward recent form

That view is strong and mostly right. Jansen took wickets, Abhishek made runs, both climbed. It has to be stated at full strength first, because a reverse take only earns its place when the argument in front of it is not a straw man.

Look twice, though, and something survives. Rankings reward the calendar, not the form. A player who gets twelve Tests a year has twelve chances to climb and twelve to slide. A player who gets five has every match double-weighted. The first will look light in the table even at a high standard; the second will look heavy on a thin sample. No. 1 is a blended certificate of quality and availability, and availability is not a skill.

The top of the all-rounder list is the most misleading No. 1 in the sport. An additive metric rewards being good on both sides — great at one, useful at the other is a combination that can reach the summit. That is why the all-rounder peak is often occupied by players whose standing looks larger than their actual contribution. The charge does not stick to Jansen, whose bowling rating alone keeps him in the top row, but the flaw in the instrument does not disappear because this particular holder escapes it.

The third Test is still running, and the rankings copy itself concedes that the top bowling spots can move quickly. That is not volatility. That is the design. The bell lap is not the finish; it is where the pattern becomes visible — and here the pattern is that the calendar decided who climbed fastest.

This article is wrong if, after the third Test, Jansen's bowling position holds for a fortnight and his all-rounder average does not drop a single point. In that case the story was pure form, not availability.

Next time a rankings story lands, check the date before the table. The numbers stay the same; the date keeps moving.