Jansen's Double Crown and Abhishek's Return: The Arithmetic the ICC Rankings Table Leaves Out

At the Wanderers in Johannesburg I was not watching from the press-box glass but from the ground-floor corridor, the one angle from which a bowler's release point sits directly in your eyeline. When Marco Jansen took the second new ball that afternoon, the first thing you felt was not pace. It was height. When that beanpole frame, close to six feet eight, stretches behind the crease, the ball leaves his hand nearly a foot above the batter's eyeline. Against Australia his deliveries were not landing on the pitch; they were hitting it and climbing. I stood in the corridor until the noise turned into a language I could carry back to my notebook.

A few days later the latest ICC weekly rankings dropped, and the same man's name sat at the top of two tables. Jansen is simultaneously the No. 1 Test bowler and the No. 1 Test all-rounder. In the same update came India's headline: Abhishek Sharma is back at No. 1 among T20I batters, after a 35-ball century against New Zealand. Ravindra Jadeja's four-year reign as the top-ranked Test all-rounder is over. All of it arrived together, which is exactly why it needs to be read one item at a time.

What the table says, and what it does not

The ICC men's player rankings are a rolling valuation. Every innings, every wicket, every run is weighted, and the strength of the opposition is priced in. Test bowling points come from wickets, batting points from runs, and the all-rounder table is the sum of the two — no separate match is played, no separate trophy is awarded. That is the key to this entire story, and it is precisely where most reporting stops.

Abhishek's file contains a date worth reading carefully. He first reached the T20I No. 1 spot in July 2026. In July of this year, Ishan Kishan took that place, with Travis Head consistently in the race alongside them. A top spot that changes hands this often is not a certificate of one player's greatness. It is a certificate for the calendar international T20 cricket is played on.

A professional disclosure here, because it separates the reader from the reporter. The ICC release that reaches us often does not clearly state the ranking week, the points gap, or the date of the update. The copy says "latest rankings" and the reader has no way to verify which week "latest" refers to. Check for the week before you trust the bulletin. Without it, the story is not a snapshot; it is fog.

The arithmetic of six feet eight

Three things run together when you watch Jansen bowl. First, release height — his frame builds an angle where the old definition of a good length stops working, because the ball has no room to sit before it climbs. Second, the front-leg block: at release his upper body does not fall forward, it holds slightly back, and that hold generates the seam movement that nibbles away from the bat. The deliveries that found the slip cordon against Australia were not magic. They were the repeated output of one machine.

Third, and least written about — workload. A fast bowler sending down forty-plus overs in a Test and batting at seven is doing two different physical jobs. In my experience the real risk for that player is not injury but sleep and recovery. Almost every all-rounder I have spoken to over the years says the hardest hour is the fourth morning, when neither the batting adrenaline nor the bowling freshness survives. For Jansen the maths is harder because the frame is long, and every mis-landing lands twice on knee and lower back.

Two crowns, or one crown counted twice?

Here is my actual argument, and it differs from the headline. Jansen's "double No. 1" is not two achievements. It is one role measured twice. A man who is the No. 1 bowler and also makes thirty or forty at seven or eight will naturally climb the all-rounder table; no additional skill has been added. Same overs, same runs, second ledger.

The inverse is equally true and equally unwritten. The all-rounder table does not reward players who do a bit of both; it rewards players who are outstanding at one discipline and useful at the other. That is why the list is full of names the world calls batters or bowlers, never all-rounders.

Which is how Jadeja's four years should be read. Four years at No. 1 in Test all-rounder rankings was not the achievement of the most talented man; it was the achievement of the man playing the most matches. That run coincided with him being one of five bowlers at home series after series, adding thirty or fifty down the order. When the selection cycle rotated, when his place away from home became a debate, the points slid on their own. Nothing in the skill had decayed. What changed was time on the field.

This is the plain truth of the beat after two decades: selection is not what you think it is. Selection is what the calendar, the purse and the priority decide. A Test calendar with four matches for one player and nine for another is already writing a ranking, before anyone has judged the cricket.

The thirty-five-ball return

Abhishek's hundred should be read the same way — first in the context of the innings, then in the context of the table. Over the last two seasons his bat has changed its relationship with the ball. Early on it travelled behind the ball; now it arrives in the ball's path. He is not reacting to what he sees but predicting where the length will land. The result is a stable base at contact, which is why his biggest shots now look like the safest ones.

Against New Zealand he made 113, the hundred coming off 35 balls — the fastest bracket in Indian T20I history. But the real story is where he started. When an opener leaves the first four deliveries of the powerplay and attacks from the fifth, he is speaking a different language. Based on my years of watching matches, the biggest share of an innings like that hides in the first three overs, when he is reading the bowler rather than the ball.

Now back to the table. T20I batting points come from recent matches, and recent means recent tours, recent series, recent rotation. When the top sides play two or three bilateral T20I series a year and rest their best batters before a World Cup, the No. 1 spot drifts to whoever played most that month. The ranking is not measuring the player's superiority. It is measuring his availability.

The names the bulletin buried

Temba Bavuma's 179 in the Test leg, after which the series finished 1-1, is not form — it is an answer to the debate that runs on his name every South African domestic season. Harry Brook moved up, among the fastest hands in the format. Scott Boland and Simon Harmer also climbed, and their profiles are not the same: Boland's rise is his bowling; Harmer's rise is the fact that domestic Tests are giving a spinner overs. Two different stories in one table. Merge them into one headline and you misread both.

The ODI table moved Ben Duckett, Shaheen Afridi and Azmatullah Omarzai upward, all in the context of the Pakistan–England–Sri Lanka tri-series. But the line I keep is that Bernard Scholtz and Mohammad Nabi keep appearing in these lists. Scholtz is from Namibia, Nabi from Afghanistan — countries with no major broadcast deal, no five-Test series, no franchise purse. Their players stand in the same table as the biggest names in the game. That is what the broadcast never carries: the loudest sound was everything that wasn't.

What the outside is misreading

Two errors are being made in the framing of this update. First, treating the double No. 1 as proof of a career peak. Rankings are a lagging indicator: they describe the last few months, not the next six. Dale Steyn calling Jansen the best cricketer in the world is his opinion and he has earned the right to it, but the quote arrives without context, date or the conversation it came from. A fast bowler praising a compatriot fast bowler is not news. The news would be Steyn telling us what separates Jansen from Steyn.

Second, and more serious: equating "No. 1 in the rankings" with "first pick in the team." After years on the auction and retention beat I will write it plainly — in Indian cricket the real selection mechanism is not the zonal selector but the franchise purse. A player can be third in the rankings and go unsold at base price; he can be ninth and be bought for ₹15.25 crore. Price and points measure different things. The ranking is what the board places on the selectors' desk; the price is what actually builds teams.

Third, the weakness in my own trade: there is no date in this story. Rankings change weekly. When a reader is told Jansen is No. 1 today, he deserves to know which today. I keep a 100-day rule: every big headline — an auction price or a ranking crown — gets revisited three months later, when the number has stopped being a number and started being a situation. For Jansen that day is the fourth Test of a five-match series away from home, bowling the thirtieth over. For Abhishek it is a series where his side is 2-0 down and two wickets have fallen inside six overs.

What next

The night I walked out of that Wanderers corridor my notebook had one line: the bowler is tall, and therefore so is the umpire. I did not know then that within days the same tall man would sit atop two tables. But I did know that when you watch a bowler's release point from the ground floor, rankings stop mattering — you only see where the ball is coming from. What happens next hides in one question: can Jansen defend a double crown across five Tests, four of them bowling spells, all of them batting? The all-rounder table is cruel to those who tire, and the cruelty is not in the body but in the calendar. For Abhishek the question is different: does the crown survive a series where India rest him before a big tour and hand three games to someone else? The points will move again, and someone will write another return to the summit. I will be in the corridor, watching where the ball was coming from when the table changed.