A Ranking Is a Timestamp, Not a Verdict: Jansen's Double Crown and Abhishek's 38-Ball Return

That night Abhishek Sharma made 113 off 38 balls, and the young photographer seated beside me in the press box stood up and clapped. I did not. I was looking at my phone, where a screenshot glowed — the ICC's latest T20I batting rankings, and Abhishek back at No. 1. The sender was not a journalist. It was a fan in the same WhatsApp group where the scorecard arrives before the official scorecard does.

The story arrived by WhatsApp before the press box did. That is not new. Nine years ago, talking to two hundred Indian supporters outside The Oval in London, I learned that the official bulletin is never the first document. But that night my first question was not about Abhishek. It was: how is Ishan Kishan's leg?

That is the actual fault line in this whole rankings story. Nobody seized the crown; somebody vacated it. Abhishek is back at No. 1 because Ishan overtook him in July, and Ishan is now injured. A hamstring decided a career peak. That is not false news. It is incomplete news, and incomplete news becomes a kind of lie the moment it turns into a headline.

I have watched this game for fifty-three years, from an era when the scorebook was filled by hand and rankings did not exist. Then we had eyes and arguments. Now we have a thousand-point scale and fewer arguments. That is not an even trade. Every week when the ICC update lands, I ask myself the same thing — is this document telling me something, or selling me something?

This week it is selling. Marco Jansen sits atop two lists — Test bowling and Test allrounder — and that is a genuine achievement. But the update has been framed so that the rest of the room disappears from the picture.

First, the basics that should appear in every rankings report and almost never do. The ICC Test rankings began in 2026, when bilateral series made it hard to say who was actually on top. Every innings earns points, older performances gradually lose weight, and a rolling window produces the rating. Which means, plainly: the ranking does not tell you who the best cricketer is. It tells you who has produced the most impact while playing the most matches in the recent window. Availability is not ability, and the ranking files both in the same ledger.

Second, this is an update, not a verdict. The third Test between South Africa and Australia was still running when the list was published. A ranking read in mid-series is a photograph of clouds in the middle of rain. The photograph is real; the sky is not.

Now the contents. On one side, Jansen: ten wickets in two Tests, 5 for 33, and 85 from No. 8. On the other, Abhishek, whose recent scores run 29, 27, and 113 off 38 balls. Between them sit Temba Bavuma's 179, Harry Brook's rising standing, Scott Boland's relentless wicket-taking, Simon Harmer climbing at 37, Shaheen Shah Afridi's return, and Azmatullah Omarzai's emergence. And beneath all of it, the names sliding — Mitchell Starc, Matt Henry, Ollie Robinson, Jasprit Bumrah, Ravindra Jadeja.

This is a document spread across two formats, six countries and three continents, and that breadth is its biggest hazard. When Test bowling, Test batting, Test allrounder, T20I batting and ODI cricket share one story, the reader's mind forgets to switch formats. I tell my three young colleagues the same thing: repeat the format in every sentence of a rankings piece, even if the desk cuts it out. Otherwise the story is accurate and still wrong.

Marco Jansen is six foot eight and bowls left-arm. That sentence sounds ordinary, but height plus angle is the one thing no coach can teach. When the release point is eight feet high and the ball is coming in, the batter must decide twice — where it will land, and whether it will go past him or at the stumps. In that half-second lies Jansen's real delivery.

Ten wickets in two Tests. 5 for 33. The lazy reading is that he must have found a fast pitch. But fast pitches reward fast bowlers for doing exactly what is expected. The true test is a slow pitch and an old ball — and Jansen's 85 came in precisely that situation, from No. 8, with his team in trouble.

Eighty-five from No. 8 costs far more than eighty-five from No. 4, because it does two jobs: it extends the tail and it breaks the opposing captain's entire plan. By then the second new ball has already been spent, the bowlers' figures are already spoiled, and the field has already changed. That is where an allrounder's value shows — not in the numbers, but in the bowlers' morale.

So Jansen's double crown is real. A player who is the No. 1 bowler and also strong enough with the bat that his team can field an extra bowler is the most valuable asset in Test cricket. South Africa looks strong for exactly that reason — though not for that reason alone.

Here is the part that is least said and most true. The allrounder ranking does not measure an allrounder. It adds two separate ratings together — batting points plus bowling points. A player who is sixty per cent bowler and forty per cent batter can outrank a genuine fifty-fifty. Mathematically sound. Cricketing debatable.

The ICC added allrounder rankings later precisely because the two skills resisted a common scale. How do you weigh a batter's ninety against a bowler's five wickets in the same hundred points? The solution was pragmatic and that is its weakness: it adds two scores and produces an average.

So when someone says Jansen is the world's best allrounder, I ask: in what sense? If the question is who took the most wickets and made the most useful runs over two years, the answer is Jansen and it is a good answer. If the question is who would no team ever drop in any condition, the answer rarely fits one name.

Ravindra Jadeja is the best illustration. His rating is sliding. Does that mean he has become a lesser allrounder than Jansen? No. It means he played fewer matches in the window, and the ranking's short memory could not hold him. The ranking is a forgetting mind, and a player's worth gets set by that forgetting.

Temba Bavuma's 179 is the least discussed biggest event in this update. A captain's hundred is always news, but we rarely ask what it followed. If it came as consolation in a lost series, it is a statistic. If it came after the series turned, it is history.

Bavuma is the story I keep writing and the market keeps ignoring — the story of late-ripening talent. Born in 2026, the first Black African captain of South Africa's Test team, measured for years by his own country's media against an average. A ranking cannot answer what was said against a player. It can only record the number that followed the answer. That is why, reading Bavuma's rising points, I think of the years when his numbers were on his critics' side.

Scott Boland reminds me that fast bowling is not a synonym for pace. Six for seven on debut at the MCG was not an accident. Debuting at thirty-two and climbing the rankings at thirty-seven is the path of a cricketer the system overlooked, who answered with rhythm rather than grievance. He puts the ball on the stumps, on the one line that forces the batter to play. It is not sexy. Nobody watches it on a screen. But the ranking watches it, because the ranking counts wickets, not beauty. That is where I trust the ranking, even when I trust it nowhere else.

Simon Harmer is thirty-seven and rising. He spent the bulk of his career in English county cricket with Essex, and when South Africa called him back he did something extraordinary with a small number of Tests. An offspinner climbing the rankings of a fast-bowling nation is proof that the system rewards those who keep playing — and Harmer's greatest achievement is that he kept playing.

Harry Brook belongs to a different school, one that teaches hitting rather than holding. His numbers are large in few matches, and the ranking likes exactly that. Watching his name rise, I think of the question I put to my colleagues: do we still rate the batter who lasts, or the one who scores fast? The ranking has answered. We have not.

Shaheen Shah Afridi's return points to an old truth. He is a left-arm quick, most dangerous with the new ball, and when fit he belongs among the five best quicks in the world. The problem has been fitness. The ranking does not reward his ceiling; it rewards his presence. The cruellest feature of the system is that it does not punish absence. It simply moves on. A player sitting out cannot even claim injustice. He can only watch someone take his place the way he once took it.

Azmatullah Omarzai is the least-told story here. Afghanistan's cricket has been known mostly for the short formats, and his rise in the Test allrounder list is the real shift in that team. The big hands, the straight ball on the seam, the fearless batting — that comes from a school where resources were absent and therefore so was the fear of loss.

The sliding list is the longest and least examined. Starc, Henry, Robinson, Bumrah, Jadeja. One of them was up four months ago; one of them will be up in four months. We ignore it because headlines belong to climbers. For me the falling list always says more about the state of the game.

Bumrah is the centre of this argument. His per-match bowling is better than anyone's alive. When he plays, he changes the match. Yet his rating slips because he does not play as many Tests as the system would like — India manages him, he manages himself, and that decision is medically correct and expensive in ranking terms. The ranking measures availability, not ability, and separating the two is the central job of cricket writing. Anyone who says Bumrah is not the world's best bowler because he is not No. 1 is handing the ranking a job it does not do.

Thinking about Bumrah's months out, I remember a line I wrote years ago and still carry: inside the bubble, the loudest story was the silence between matches. When a player is not playing, his greatest achievement is his silence, and nobody counts it. In the ledger it is zero.

Now the other side. Abhishek's 113 off 38 balls is a strike rate near 297. The scorecard entry is an event by itself. What mattered more was the first six balls, when he found position against the quicks — the part no scorecard records. Before that came 29 and 27. That sequence matters: a young batter learning, holding, and then one night everything connects. The ranking counts that night. It does not count what the previous two innings taught. A T20I ranking that turns over the top spot on a 38-ball sample is not measuring the gap between players. It is measuring their fluctuation.

And here is the turn that matters most. The headline says Abhishek took the crown back. He did not take it. It was returned to him. This is a crown created by an injury report, not by an innings. That is not a small thing. It is proof that in this system a top spot is not a state but a temporary vacancy, and whoever fills it first gets to call it his.

I am not angry about this. I am curious. When a reporter writes that Abhishek reclaimed the crown, he should also tell us where the news of Ishan's injury came from. I do not have that information. I know only that Ishan is out. When a report tells me the nature of the injury and its timeline, I feel I have read the whole page; otherwise I have read half of it.

Here I want to talk about the room where I learned the most. In 2026, standing outside a captain's press conference in Moscow with no seat and no question, I saw that the real story after a press conference is never inside the room — it is in the corridor. I was the only Indian there who was not a football reporter. I waited two hours and got nothing. But I learned what I still use: the best locker-room detail usually waits outside the official schedule.

The rankings update does not wait outside the official schedule. It is the official schedule. The ICC sends a release each week, decides whose name goes first, and we write in that order. When Jansen's two top spots appear in one headline, it is worth asking who chose that. Not a journalist. Not an editor. The choice was made before the release was sent.

I am not saying the ICC is lying. I am saying the ranking is a marketing document as well as a technical one. The moment we treat it as purely technical, we carry the marketing half forward without noticing. And the reader who treats a ranking as a verdict is never told that the same ranking will crown someone else in four weeks.

I first asked who rankings are for when I was doing television commentary and we needed graphics telling viewers each player's position. Then I thought rankings were for the audience. Now I think they are for three parties — the board, the broadcaster, and the agent. The board, because a ranking is the easiest proof of success in a sponsor meeting. The broadcaster, because a graphic with two arrows and a number is cheaper than analysis. The agent, because a No. 1 badge sits down at the contract table.

This reminds me of the football World Cup where my outlet sent me as a cultural correspondent. There I found football's fans just as tangled in numbers, only under different names. An Indian couple in Moscow who had spent their savings on the trip asked me what their favourite player's xG was. I asked where they had learned the term. They said: on television.

That is where I learned something I still use. A number never does damage by itself. Damage happens when the number replaces the question we should have asked. A young colleague told me last week that Jansen is the world's best bowler because the ranking says so. I asked him: if the ranking says something else tomorrow, will your opinion change? He laughed. I did not.

The third Test is not over. The most honest line in the update is the one that should be in every update and never is: this photograph is already ageing. The top bowling spot can change within days, and that mutability is the system's best quality. It does not seat anyone permanently on a throne.

The real question is what we do with that mutability. When Abhishek scores two twenties next series, will we write that he is losing form? We should not. We should write that he is a dangerous T20 batter who occasionally gets out. And when Ishan returns fit, we must ask whose place he takes — a question for the selection committee, not the ranking, and the place where the actual story lives.

I found this out at thirty-two: before rankings, a journalist saying a bowler was the best had to bring twenty years of watching and a fan's memory of history. Today a twenty-year-old reporter can make the same claim with a screenshot. That is democratic. It is also dangerous.

When the next update arrives — and it will — I will do what I have done for fifty years. I will look first at who sent the screenshot, then at whose name is missing from it, and only then decide what to write about. Haste has never been my habit, and that is my greatest strength.

Every deadline has a rhythm; I listen for the beat before I write.