Marco Jansen's Two No. 1s and Abhishek Sharma's Return: What the ICC Rankings Are Actually Measuring

Two No. 1 tags landed on the same name in one weekly update: Marco Jansen is now the top-ranked Test bowler and the top-ranked Test all-rounder. In the same update, Abhishek Sharma returned to No. 1 among T20I batters. For a bulletin, that is two clean headlines, and a Dale Steyn quote — calling Jansen the best cricketer in the world — is enough to give both of them a pulse.

I read the table once, then again. My first question was not how large the achievement is. My first question was: what is the denominator? How many innings? Which ranking week? How many points between first and second? The spreadsheet had 4,180 rows. Not one of them explained the noise around a No. 1 spot.

In 2026, in the old Eden Gardens block, sitting in the Cricket Association of Bengal's first full-time video-analyst chair, I hand-tagged 4,180 Ranji Trophy deliveries — seam position, release angle, a nine-zone grid for pitch landing. The most useful column in that exercise was never wickets. It was false shots induced, whether or not a wicket fell. That column is what flagged Mukesh Kumar, whose wobble-seam release sat measurably wider than the squad's other right-arm quicks. I wrote it into a 2,000-word newsletter post. Nobody at the association read it.

I bring it up because the ICC rankings are a wickets column. They count outcomes. They do not count the quality of the ball, the pressure on the batter, or the pitch and opposition a seamer was handed. And the thing in this week's news that deserves the most attention is not Jansen's double. It is the missing date.

A rankings bulletin without the ranking week is not a bulletin. It is a screenshot.

This is not a list of grievances; it is the condition of the trade I have worked in for 24 years. Rankings move weekly. Jansen's two positions, Abhishek's century figures, Ishan Kishan's interim No. 1, Travis Head's place in the same conversation — none of those claims can be verified without a date. And the bulletin contains its own contradiction: one line places Abhishek's first ascent at No. 1 in July 2026, another says Ishan Kishan took the spot from him in July this year. Both cannot be true at once. That is not a small slip. It is evidence that the table is being read as a story rather than as a document.

The Test mechanism: addition, not balance

The Test bowling rating is built on wickets, opposition strength, match situation and recent-form weighting. The all-rounder rating is built differently: it is the sum of batting rating points and bowling rating points. The addition is so literal that its distortion is routinely ignored.

The all-rounder table measures addition, not balance — and in an addition, the larger bowling number wins.

Jansen is the cleanest illustration. He is No. 1 with the ball. The points attached to that position are high enough that competent batting lifts him to the top of the all-rounder list as well. His second No. 1 is not a batting achievement; it is interest earned on his bowling achievement.

Ravindra Jadeja's four-year reign at the top was built on the opposite logic. His batting rating and bowling rating sat close to each other. That was not the residue of a sum; it was the product of a balance. When we say the top of the all-rounder table has changed hands, we are not saying the definition of an all-rounder has changed. We are saying the arithmetic is favouring one profile over another — and that preference shifts weekly, because the points shift and the definition does not.

This is where an old habit earns its keep. I count deliveries the way other people count regrets — quietly, past midnight. And that counting taught me one distinction I keep returning to: the performance is the trigger, the table's arithmetic is the mechanism. Jansen's match-winning spell against Australia was the trigger. The mechanism was that his bowling points already sat close enough to the summit that one good match pulled him up two tables at once. The story reports the trigger. It does not report the mechanism.

Abhishek Sharma: No. 1 is a form indicator

113 off 38 balls against New Zealand, including a 35-ball hundred. After that innings, Abhishek returned to the top of the T20I batting rankings. The number is outstanding and there is nothing to argue about in it. The question is about the design of the table.

The T20I batting rating is the most volatile of the three formats, because its window is the shortest and the weight on strike rate is the heaviest. Over a sample of twelve to fifteen innings, one innings that breaks the runs-per-ball scale can move a player several places. That is why Ishan Kishan briefly reached No. 1 in July, and why Travis Head has stayed inside that orbit for months. The margin at the top is thin enough that a single innings crosses it.

The T20I ranking is a form indicator, not proof of class.

The practical consequence is that Abhishek's No. 1 does not describe the limits of his batting; it describes the speed of it. If the next series is away, on a surface with bounce where the ball does not come on, the same table will show him three or four places lower — and that fall will explain as little as this rise does. I have spent seven seasons inside coaching-staff rooms. No selection meeting there begins with a line from the rankings. It begins with false shots induced: which ball the batter was trapped on, which length broke his shot selection. The ranking does not answer that question.

The ODI table: smallest sample, weakest claim

The rest of the bulletin carries Temba Bavuma's 179 in a series drawn 1-1, the climbs of Harry Brook, Scott Boland and Simon Harmer, and the T20I positions of Sanju Samson, Finn Allen, Mitchell Santner and Arshdeep Singh. The ODI section sits inside the Pakistan-England-Sri Lanka tri-series, with Ben Duckett, Shaheen Afridi, Azmatullah Omarzai, Namibia's Bernard Scholtz and Afghanistan's Mohammad Nabi.

The ODI table is the least trustworthy of the three here, and the reason is not cricket but the calendar. Full Members now play very few ODIs; Associate nations play more in the same window. When you merge populations with different fixture densities into one list, the top position becomes partly a reward for having been given more ODIs. The presence of Scholtz and Nabi raises no question about their ability. It raises a question about who they are being compared with.

The Test table carries a finer version of the same problem: the World Test Championship cycle hands one team eight matches and another fifteen. A player's points are shaped by his board's schedule as much as by his talent. A Russian summer taught me that weather is a variable nobody puts in the model. In cricket that weather is the fixture calendar, and it sits underneath all three tables.

Nobody told you about the load

The Dale Steyn quote is the most honest part of the story, because what it is doing is obvious: emotion. 'The best cricketer in the world' is an opinion, not a conclusion derived from the table. The real weakness of the quote is not its claim but its provenance — when it was said, in what context, to whom. A sentence that travels without a date and without a setting slowly acquires the behaviour of a fact.

My objection is not to Jansen's two No. 1s. It is that the bulletin built a story about 'the best' and left out the one column that matters most: load. A six-foot-eight left-arm quick who bowls eighteen overs in an innings and also bats at seven or eight — his double No. 1 is a prize and a warning simultaneously. The kinesiology I studied before this career makes one plain point: a top all-rounder ranking is a workload document, not only a quality document.

The table has no column that adds overs bowled to balls faced — which is why selectors read 'No. 1 all-rounder' as a licence rather than as a restraint.

Every auction paddle goes up before the logic arrives; my job is to arrive earlier. Franchises study this table in a mini-auction with a seriousness they reserve for almost no other document, because 'No. 1' is a price and a points gap is an opening line in a negotiation. That is not a vice. It becomes one only when a trigger is mistaken for a mechanism.

What to watch next

First: whether Jansen holds both top positions across a full WTC cycle under a load that includes being the No. 1 bowler and a top-six batter at once. Second: which surface Abhishek's No. 1 survives — a flat home deck or away bounce. Third: whether the next few updates print the ranking week, the points and the gap alongside the position.

If the table simply told us its date, how much of the story would change?