Two Crowns, Two Ledgers: Jansen's Ten Wickets and Abhishek's 113 — Auditing the ICC Rankings Update

Marco Jansen's name appears twice in this ICC rankings update. Top of the Test bowling table, and top of the Test allrounder table. Both entries come from the same tour: ten wickets across two Tests against Australia, a 5/33 in one innings, and 85 batting at No. 8. For anyone reading the scorecard, that is a fine series. For anyone reading the rankings sheet, those are two separate calculations. The bowling table converts wickets, run rate and the quality of the batter at the other end into a weighted average. The allrounder table keeps its own ledger: take the batting rating, multiply it by the bowling rating, divide by a thousand. Jansen's second crown is not the next chapter of the first one; it is a by-product. Eighty-five at No. 8 pushes the batting rating up, the bowling rating was already high, and the multiplication turns two rising numbers into a third, faster-rising one. I first understood the arithmetic of that multiplication in Pune, after a Test where I logged all four innings ball by ball and found that the sweep explained almost as much as the surface did. The notebook became a spreadsheet somewhere between Pune and the press box. The order of operations changed for me after that: formula first, number second, story third. Apply that order to Abhishek Sharma. He is back at No. 1 among T20I batters, and the reason is direct: 113 off 38 balls against New Zealand. Earlier in the same series he had made 29 and 27. Three very different innings, and the rankings selected the third. That selection is not an accident. The T20I batting table weights strike rate, and 113 off 38 — roughly 297 — moves a weighted average in a single innings. So much is clear. The question is what this update is actually a record of: form, or the most recent innings. Answering it means first settling what a rankings update is. The ICC's Test, ODI and T20I tables are three separate ledgers with three separate scales. These are not fixed points; they are moving averages. Every innings and every match is added, and older performances decay in weight. The No. 1 spot is not a career verdict — it is a timestamped photograph of recent form. There is a minimum-match threshold so that three innings cannot lift a player to the top. The allrounder table is built differently: your position there reflects how balanced you are across two skills, not how dominant you are in one. That distinction changes how the update should be read. When someone writes that Jansen is both the best Test bowler and the best Test allrounder, they are merging two different measures into one sentence. The bowling crown came from his bowling. The allrounder crown came from the gap between his bowling and his batting. In the second, he is not beating an opponent; he is beating his own ratio. Now the calendar, because a ledger entry without a date is an incomplete entry. Three separate series sit inside this update window — South Africa against Australia in Tests, India against New Zealand in T20Is, and an ODI tri-series in Pakistan and the UAE. Naming all three in one roundup is natural, and it is also where the first risk appears. When ten Test wickets, a T20I 113 and an ODI figure share a paragraph, the reader starts weighing them on one scale. They are three scales. The South Africa series is the Test component, and its first name is Jansen. Two Tests, ten wickets, 5/33 in one innings. Do not read that as a wicket count alone. Test bowling ratings also record the surface, the batting order and the match situation in which the wickets came. Three wickets with the new ball and three with the old one are not equal in the algorithm, because the quality of the batter changes. Jansen's 5/33 was the most economical passage of that innings, and that is what pulls him up the list. The 85 at No. 8 belongs to a different category. Runs made from the eighth position carry doubled value in the Test context, because batting there is about stopping a collapse rather than building a score. When a tailender makes 85, the scorecard shows runs; the rankings multiplication shows full weight. That is why Jansen sits atop two tables at once in this update. It is rare, but it should not be read as a miracle. It is arithmetic doing exactly what it was designed to do. There is a structural softness in the allrounder table that this update exposes. Very few players in world cricket bowl at the top level and bat at the top level in Tests. The allrounder pool is therefore small, and in a small pool a single good innings produces a visible jump. Reaching No. 1 among bowlers usually takes several series, because hundreds of active bowlers compete there. Reaching No. 1 among allrounders can sometimes take one match. Ravindra Jadeja's presence in the same conversations is instructive. His batting rating has been stable for years, his bowling rating high on home surfaces. Jansen's two ratings have moved sharply in a few months. Stability and surge sit in the same table, and the multiplication rewards both identically. That is the table's strength and its limit. Now the T20I ledger. Abhishek's No. 1 is the cleanest story in this update and the easiest to misread. A 113 off 38 means he did in half an innings what many teams do not manage in a full one. The 29 and 27 before it were not poor, but against 113 they look small in the arithmetic, because the T20I batting table rewards pace as well as volume. That inversion deserves naming. The Test table rewards patience: more balls, fewer risks, longer innings. The T20I table does the opposite, paying for runs per ball. The same batter playing the same way in both formats would land at very different heights on the two lists. Abhishek's 113 is the product of that inverted scale. Behind the No. 1 sits another entry that deserves its own line: Ishan Kishan's injury. In July, Ishan took the spot from Abhishek. Now Abhishek has it back, and part of the reason is not his batting but the vacancy opposite him. In a rankings system this is ordinary. When a player is out injured, his points freeze, and the man below him climbs with one good innings. Which is why the phrase "took back the crown" is larger than the fact. The crown was not taken back. It was briefly vacated, and now it is filled. Temba Bavuma's 179 is the second major entry in the Test batting table. It was an innings made in the hardest circumstance for a captain — with the team under pressure and the shape of the series being decided. Such an innings weighs more than a routine hundred, because the quality of the opposing attack is at its peak at that moment. Harry Brook also moves upward. For England batters this is a different kind of ledger, because their calendar swings quickly between home and away surfaces and the rankings do not fully capture that swing. Scott Boland's rise is the other side of the same argument: a bowler who plays few matches but performs when he does, and a system that does not treat low volume as a weakness. It is a known flaw in the table, which does not mean Boland's output should be discounted. Simon Harmer's upward movement repeats something the general conversation underplays: spin in Test cricket is still paid for in the fourth innings, and a spinner who can extract pace from a surface climbs quickly. Shaheen Shah Afridi and Azmatullah Omarzai rising is a different kind of news for Pakistan and Afghanistan, whose match calendars are lighter than the European or Indian ones, and whose points therefore move more per match. Mitchell Starc, Matt Henry, Ollie Robinson and Jasprit Bumrah appear together in the pace list. Four names, four different problems. Starc carries the heaviest calendar, Henry the lightest, Robinson the most uncertain, Bumrah the most controlled. The rankings place all four in one column, even though the conditions in front of them are not the same. This is where I part company with the standard framing. A rankings roundup naturally follows a template: performance happened, points rose, crown changed hands. The sequence looks clean, but it reads the arithmetic backwards. Rankings points are not built by today's innings; they are built from a weighted average of the last twenty or thirty matches. An innings jolts that average; it does not create it. So when someone writes that ten wickets took Jansen to No. 1, what they are really saying is that ten wickets pushed him up from where he was already sitting. The two sentences sit on different ground. My second disagreement is about durability. The No. 1 Test bowling spot is currently the least secure No. 1 in the game, because the top three or four bowlers sit within a narrow band of averages and a series is live. Four wickets in one innings can reorder the list. Any reading of this update should record that it is a moving picture, and that the picture can change before the series ends. My third is about format blending. Naming a Test crown, a T20I crown and an ODI tri-series inside one report creates the impression that these are points in the same competition. They are three leagues. Abhishek's 113 is not bigger or smaller than Jansen's 5/33; they are two entries in two separate books. My fourth, and the one that irritates most, is treating the allrounder crown as equal to the bowling crown. No. 1 in the bowling table tells you the most effective bowler in the world. No. 1 in the allrounder table tells you the most balanced cricketer in the world. Balance is a virtue, but it is not the same virtue as impact. Collapsing both into "the best Test player" is unfair to the system itself. A commercial layer attaches here, and cricket coverage rarely records it. These numbers leave the field and enter the market. At an auction table, "the world's No. 1 allrounder" becomes a line item, and the price of that line item is set by the same multiplication we just walked through. Agents and managements pick the line up as fast as the ranking changes. Contract dates and ranking dates are never the same date, and that gap sets the real price of a great many deals. The ledger should note it. Now the part the numbers cannot tell you. 113 off 38 does not say which shots were chosen, in which over the risk was taken, or where the fielders stood. 5/33 does not say whether those wickets came with the new ball or with reverse swing, or whether one of them was a tailender whose dismissal carries less weight in the multiplication. The 85 at No. 8 does not say whether the innings was played to save the team or to build a total. These things live outside the scorecard, and guessing at them without watching is the mistake I stopped making after the 2026 England tour. That tour taught me to audit the tour before trusting the tour — look at the scores, the surfaces, the tosses, and the distance between what the captain said at the press conference and what the scorecard permitted. In my notebook, this update leaves two lines blank. One for the date the update does not carry, and one for the result of the third Test that is still being played. A ranking without a date is like a receipt without a stamp: the number may be right, but matching it to anything becomes hard. Two UAE winters taught me that, when the bio-bubble shut the mixed zone and the whole beat ran on Zoom pressers; even then, what held up was the timestamp, not the analysis. Three things sit in my ledger going forward. First, the next South Africa–Australia Test: if Jansen takes fewer than four wickets there, the top of the bowling table can move, and so can the top of the allrounder table, because both run on the same arithmetic. Second, the rest of India's T20I series: Abhishek's No. 1 is not safe until Ishan Kishan's return date is fixed, because a player coming back from injury arrives with frozen points intact. Third, the ODI tri-series in Pakistan and the UAE, whose effect lands in the next update, by which time readers will not remember which week the matches belonged to. A No. 1 ranking is a date, not a verdict. Those who read it as a verdict will be found changing their argument at the next update. Those who read it as a date already know what is about to change. My notebook is in the second camp. And the most important entry this time is not a crown — it is the scorecard of the third Test that has not yet been filled in. Without it, this update is unfinished. And verdicts do not get written on unfinished ledgers.