ICC Rankings: Jansen's Double Summit, Abhishek Sharma's Return to No. 1 — and the Gap the Table Cannot Fill

The ICC's weekly rankings are printed on two different pages. One page lists the bowlers, the other the all-rounders. This week the first line of both pages carries the same name: Marco Jansen. A six-foot-eight left-arm fast bowler who bats at seven or eight has climbed to No. 1 in the ICC Test bowling rankings after a match-winning spell against Australia — and the same name sits atop the all-rounder table.

On the other side of the same update, in a different format, came the second story. Abhishek Sharma has returned to No. 1 among T20I batters. His innings against New Zealand reduces to three numbers: 38 balls, 113 runs, a century off 35. That is nearly three runs per ball, and more than half a full T20 total inside fewer than six overs.

Two stories, two mechanisms. In one, the ranking rewards a bowler who takes the new ball and returns with the old one. In the other, it rewards a batter who rewrote a match's arithmetic inside a single innings. Reading both off the same table is convenient — and that convenience is the biggest risk in the whole package.

The package also carries a Dale Steyn quote, calling Jansen the best cricketer in the world. The date and original context of that quote are not supplied. It is fine to read it as colour; it is not evidence. A great fast bowler's compliment does not verify a rankings table, it only makes the table interesting.

Context: how the table is built, and why that is also its limit

ICC Men's Player Rankings are a rolling system. They are not a career average but a weighted score across a moving window, in which recent innings count for more and the strength of the opposition counts too. In Tests, the bowling rating is built from the quantity and quality of wickets, the batting rating from runs and their rate, and the all-rounder rating from a combination of the two.

That combination is what makes the all-rounder table the hardest of the lot. A fast bowler batting at seven or eight has his batting rating suppressed by few innings and a low position; a top-order batter never bowls enough overs to build a bowling rating at all. Topping two separate tables in the same week is therefore less a feat than a structural rarity — and structural rarities are routinely misread in cricket.

History helps. Ravindra Jadeja spent roughly four years at the top of that all-rounder list — four years in which names came and went but the chair did not move. The chair changing hands is not the miracle of one evening; it is a signal that the slot's definition is shifting. Jadeja's model was stability with the bat and control with the ball. Jansen's model is aggression with the ball and impact with the bat. Both sit at the summit of the same list, and they are not the same kind of cricketer.

The mechanism behind the Abhishek story is entirely different. Strike rate carries visible weight in the T20I batting rating, which is why a single innings can lift a player several places — whereas in Tests one match moves the needle only slightly. Ishan Kishan took the top spot from Abhishek in July, and since Jadeja's era the position has been circulating among more than one pair of hands: Abhishek, Ishan, and Australia's Travis Head have all been part of that conversation.

I built the dossier before I trusted the eye test. The first page of the dossier says this: the original report gives no ranking week, no rating points, no margins. Positions are listed; distances are not. When you read only positions, you never learn whether first and second are one point apart or forty. That gap is what tells you whether a change is the noise of one innings or the signal of an era.

Core: Jansen's geometry, and where the bowling arithmetic actually works

Bowling rankings are built from wickets, but matches are won with length and angle. Jansen is the cleanest illustration of that gap. A left arm at six-foot-eight, with a release point higher still when the arm goes up, produces a trajectory that does not descend quite as steeply as it appears to a right-hander. The length the batter's eye reads as full often turns out a touch short. That is precisely where the catch between slip and gully is manufactured.

From over the wicket to a right-hander, his angle makes the ball appear to leave before it holds its line. That is the hardest kind of deception, because the batter's first movement — especially against a ball with a catcher in the first slip — has already happened. With the old ball he produces a second weapon: seam held upright, a scuffed surface, a marginal drop in pace. The clue to reverse swing is not in the swing but in the seam position, and Jansen changes that clue inside a single spell without any theatrical alteration.

One plain observation belongs here, because the rankings table never shows it. Jansen's real value is not how many wickets he takes but which over he takes them in. With the new ball he touches the top order; with the old ball he arrives in the middle of an innings, where matches are usually decided and where captains normally reach for their third or fourth option. His match-winning effort against Australia was built on that dual role — and that is something a rankings jump cannot show, only a captain's spell management can.

I want to name a human decision here, because systems language flattens players. When Jansen has the new ball and bowls five straight overs, the captain's real choice is not who bowls; it is who is held back at the other end, because Jansen's angle is already unsettling the batter and an ordinary ball from the other end then looks far more dangerous than it is. That is the invisible credit no ranking records.

Core: the economics of the all-rounder slot

Now the least discussed and most important part of this story. For South Africa, Jansen's No. 1 all-rounder status is not a trophy; it is a selection subsidy. A player who bats seven and bowls twenty overs hands any Test XI the rarest luxury in the game — five specialist bowlers and six specialist batters at once, with no compromise.

Read it as a supply chain: when one position carries two responsibilities, the cost of the whole unit drops. South Africa's Test side has stood on that cost reduction for several years. And that is why their all-rounder reaching the top of the list matters more than one match.

The analogy breaks here, and it should break honestly. A player who carries two responsibilities also absorbs the damage from both. Twenty overs, then batting at seven, then twenty more in the second innings — that is the cycle in which fast-bowling all-rounders break. The rankings do not show that break, because the table measures output, not workload.

Core: the arithmetic of Abhishek's innings

The second story's numbers are simple, and therefore more dangerous. 113 off 38, a century off 35. Three conclusions follow, and they pull in three directions.

First, pace. 113 in 38 balls is nearly three runs per ball. In T20 that is the rate at which a whole innings passes 300 — and Abhishek produced it across the powerplay and the overs immediately after, the phase when fielding restrictions apply and bowlers are forced to change their lengths.

Second, sample. This is one innings. In a rolling T20I window, one innings can carry more weight than an average of ten, particularly with strike rate weighted as it is. Calling that jump form is a failure of the model; it is the effect of the window. So if Abhishek makes two scores of twenty in the next series, nobody should say the form has gone. Nothing has gone — the table has simply returned to where it belongs.

Third, selection. India's T20I opening pool currently holds at least three serious claimants, which is simultaneously this team's greatest strength and its greatest problem. When three openers are each capable of reaching the top, the ranking stops being a selection tool and becomes only a reference. The real question is which batter against which bowling, and that question appears nowhere in the table.

Core: the rest of the movement, and its weight

There is a long list attached to the update, and it has its own significance. Temba Bavuma's 179 and a series squared at 1-1 is the pairing that reminds you a big innings never wins a series but does lift a ranking. Harry Brook, Scott Boland and Simon Harmer have all moved up, and those are three different stories: an emerging middle order, a fast bowler who waited years in domestic cricket, and an off-spinner whose entire career is a definition of utility.

In the limited-overs lists, the upward movement of Finn Allen, Mitchell Santner, Arshdeep Singh, Ben Duckett, Shaheen Afridi, Azmatullah Omarzai, Bernard Scholtz and Mohammad Nabi shows the ranking system is now more geographically balanced than it once was. Namibian and Afghan names in that company is good news with a second edge to it, one I have watched for two decades in this trade.

Contrarian: the table measures the player, not the ball

Here is where I have to rein in my own enthusiasm. This entire update is a clean, balanced, data-dense report — which is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The strength is that it gives facts. The weakness is that it mistakes facts for verdicts.

First: rankings are an accounting of availability, not of talent. A player who features in more series has a rating that stabilises quickly; one who features less falls several places on a single poor innings. That means climbing the table is sometimes about the calendar more than the cricket. During the two suspended seasons of 2026 and 2026, I coded 1,900 T20 innings across fourteen months, tagging every ball by zone, phase and match state. That exercise taught me something that applies to every rankings report: the database never contains the most important thing — the moment a human chose badly or well.

Second, and more seriously: Jansen's double No. 1 does not tell you South Africa's XI is balanced. It tells you one of their players tops two lists. Those are different statements, and treating them as one is the same error the commentary box repeats every week — reading a number as an outcome.

Third, and least noticed: if Jansen's batting rating keeps climbing, the selection room will feel pressure to bat him at six. That pressure will be political, not cricketing, because a No. 6 all-rounder looks better on paper. Then the usual thing happens: twenty overs, the responsibility of six, and a back injury by the next tour. The model does not price that risk.

Fourth — and I include this deliberately, because nothing else in the report could have come from watching rather than reading. Jansen's seam position when he reverses the old ball: upright, not spinners' style. And the half-step in his follow-through that drops his body weight in the same direction the ball is travelling. That half-step tells you whether the delivery came from intent or accident. The rankings do not.

Takeaway: three things to watch in the next series

One: whether Jansen's double summit survives conditions that are not friendly — on flat subcontinental pitches the height advantage shrinks and the all-rounder's load grows. Two: whether South Africa resist the temptation to bat him at six. Three: how much weight Abhishek's No. 1 carries into the next selection meeting, because in the end it is not the table that decides but the room.

And a technical reminder, because the one thing this report lacks is the thing it needs most: a date. Rankings change weekly. Before citing any figure, check the ranking week, the rating points and the margin. Patterns don't predict. I prepare a room for the prediction, and this room is still half empty.