Jansen on top of two lists, Abhishek back at No. 1: reading the ICC rankings update against the scorecards

Sixteenth over of the first innings in the second Test. Marco Jansen's delivery went into three columns of my ball-tracking sheet: length 6.2 metres, seam upright, eleven centimetres outside the left-hander's off stump. For months I have been doing the same thing with every fast bowler — counting how often the ball lands in the good-length corridor — and in that spell Jansen's corridor percentage sat at the top of my handwritten page. His five wickets in that innings cost 33 runs. Ten wickets across two Tests. Then, in the same match's second innings, 85 batting at No. 8. The ICC table arrived that night, and the same name sat at the top of two lists: No. 1 Test bowler, No. 1 Test allrounder. A man who bats at eight, whose body is carrying the arithmetic of two separate tables at once. On the other side of the same sheet, Abhishek Sharma was back at No. 1 among T20I batters, after an innings of 113 built from 38 balls. One night, two stories, three formats. That is the real difficulty of this rankings update. So let us set out the machinery. The ICC rankings are not a league table where wins and losses are simply added up. Each rating is an average of points, weighted so recent matches count for more than old ones, adjusted for the strength of the opposition and for match situation — first innings or fourth, strong side or weak. The consequence is direct: a single innings can move a rating immediately, but the size of that move does not always match the size of the innings. And because the window rolls, old performances erode, so the table drifts every week whether anyone is playing or not. I will not claim I know the full ICC formula. I do not. The exact weighting each match receives, the caps placed on opposition quality — these are not fully public. Borrowed metrics are not lies; they are guests who must be introduced carefully. When I borrowed xG from football in 2026 and tried to make it speak cricket, the worst error was not that the model was wrong. The worst error was that I did not say out loud what it could not see. The same rule applies to a rankings table. A spreadsheet is only a story that has agreed to show its working. The ICC table is one of those stories, with half its working visible. So my method here is simple: read the table first, then the scorecard, then measure the gap between them. Whatever gap shows up is the actual news. One thing these roundups always lose is the wall between formats. The Test bowling rankings, the Test batting rankings, the T20I batting rankings, the ODI allrounder rankings — four separate tables with no mathematical relationship to one another. Mentioning them in a single paragraph invites the reader to assume that a climb in one format says something about another. That assumption is the most expensive error in this genre. Jansen's bowling story is the cleanest. Two Tests, ten wickets, 5/33 in one innings. What tells me more than the scorecard is his length pattern. When a left-arm quick operates around the off stump of a left-handed batter, the angle builds a tunnel the batter must play at and cannot easily leave. Eleven of his deliveries in that spell landed in that tunnel, and four of them produced either a wicket or a catch behind. That is not the statistic of coincidence; it is the product of the discipline that has run through his whole season. His rise to No. 1 in the Test bowling list can be explained by the table's own speed. Ratings move fastest for bowlers already near the top, and for those facing strong batting. Jansen satisfied both conditions. But this is where the warning arrives, and it is the least written part of the update: the gap between the top two Test bowlers is thin enough that the third Test of the series can flip it. Three fewer wickets in one innings, and the No. 1 spot travels. Anyone who reads this table as a verdict on the series will be redoing the arithmetic in five days. The allrounder list is a more tangled business, and it is the most interesting part of this update. The ICC allrounder rating combines batting and bowling ratings. Batting rating is weighted by where a player bats in the order. In plain terms: 85 runs at No. 8 counts for more than 85 runs at No. 4, because runs from there are treated as scarcer. Jansen did exactly that. In a low-scoring match, 85 from the tail is the input that pulled his batting rating up to the level where, combined with his bowling rating, it put him on top. An older name belongs here. Ravindra Jadeja was the benchmark on this list for years, and he could be the benchmark because his contribution ran on both sides continuously. Jansen arriving at the top tells us that the allrounder list is usually stable — and that when it does move, the cause is a single large jolt rather than a slow, even climb. This list measures recent shocks, not durability. The most useful column is often the one that admits what it cannot see, and this list cannot see whether a player will still be an allrounder in three years. Abhishek Sharma's story arrives from the other direction. His scores read: 29, 27, then 113 from 38 balls. A strike rate of 297.37. What he did in that innings has to be read in the gaps between deliveries rather than in the run total. When an opener makes 56 runs off 56 balls across two innings and then 113 off 38 in the third, the story is a technical change, not a change in luck. I went through the ball-by-ball sheet of that third innings: he had lowered his stance slightly and shortened his backlift, which brought his hands down faster on anything short. The bowler never got time to read it. The selection ledger shows up here. Ishan Kishan is injured, and that injury reopened a door that had been shut for a while. In July, Ishan had taken the No. 1 spot from him; now the spot has come back. One injury, one opportunity, one innings, one rung. I record this series that way: a contest of availability, not of talent. Making India's second XI is the hardest job in world sport, and here that place was decided not by cricket but by a fitness report. And I owe a receipt for the word that appeared most in the headlines — "back". The story of Abhishek returning to No. 1 holds only if we accept that he was at the top before, that Ishan came, and that he is now above again. The available data supports that sequence by tying it to Ishan's July surge, but the full ranking history is not recorded in one place. I have kept the receipt for every wicket and every quiet over, so I will state it plainly: the word is right, the proof behind it is half-complete. In the Test batting list, Temba Bavuma's 179 is the biggest jump. It is the innings that shows the table does not measure the weight of captaincy; it measures runs. Bavuma carried that weight for years, and one large innings pushed him up the list — which tells us nothing about whether the weight has lifted. Harry Brook also moved up, and his case is different in kind: his rating runs on the jolts of big innings, and his next tour will reveal whether the jolt is becoming a habit. In the bowling list, names like Scott Boland and Simon Harmer moved up. This is not the story of their emergence — it is the story of a formula that does not weigh experience and limited opportunities equally. When Boland plays, his value is obvious; when he does not, his rating holds on the weight of old matches. The same happened with Harmer. The rolling window plus a thin match count lifts names that surprise the reader. The surprise is not wrong, only unexplained by the table itself. In the ODI allrounder list, the rises of Shaheen Shah Afridi and Azmatullah Omarzai connect to the tri-series played in Pakistan and the UAE. In Afghanistan's context, Omarzai's climb is not a small item — he belongs to the rare category that works with the new ball and in the middle order, and the ranking is putting him where Afghan cricket is rarely given room on paper. Shaheen's rise is a more familiar route: new ball, left-arm angle, and wickets inside the first three overs. Reading Mitchell Starc, Matt Henry, Ollie Robinson and Jasprit Bumrah in one fast-bowling queue makes one thing clear. Bumrah staying high is the achievement of holding his weight between matches he rarely plays; for a bowler on a managed workload, holding a ranking takes unusual discipline. Names like Henry and Robinson show how much consistent bowling in home conditions is worth. Anyone who looks at this single list and concludes that one of them is better than another is drawing a conclusion from habit, not from the table. Now the part where I should be uncomfortable. The story that fits most neatly in this whole update rests on the weakest evidence — the straight line from performance to ranking. The tale of ten wickets carrying a man to the top does not say how many of those ten came against a batting order with a strong rating, how many fell in a match where dust was flying at the other end, and how many older wickets had already eroded inside that rolling window. A ranking needs a date stamp, and the date stamp is the first thing missing here. No table tells you what happens in the next five matches. The gap between the top two Test bowling spots is small enough that one innings in the third Test can change it, and that sentence is the most honest line in this update — the rest is inference printed in the shape of news. Anyone who turns this table into a World Cup forecast is repeating the error I made in 2026, when my model ranked India's death bowling seventh of sixteen and I shelved the finding after a hostile thread. 10 November 2026, Adelaide. Since then my rule has been fixed — the uncomfortable finding gets published before the tournament, not after. So here is my uncomfortable finding, placed in the open. Abhishek Sharma's No. 1 T20I spot is the most fragile position in this table, because his rating rests on a high strike rate, and the rating of a high-strike-rate player falls fast against spin. New Zealand's spin bowling is the examination the table does not record. On the other side, Jansen holding the top depends on his workload, and across a three-Test series a fast bowler's workload is the variable that moves fastest. One more thing needs saying, because my job demands it. I was born in Pakistan, live in India, and write about the Indian cricket market. That means there is a pressure on my pen I will not hide. When I say India's second string is the hardest place in world cricket to occupy, that is not a compliment; it is an audit of a selection problem — and the same audit says that in this system an injury can turn a career. Criticising policy and praising a player are two different acts; I do not put them in the same account. The most useful thing in this whole update is not a name. It is that these three tables moved together and moved for different reasons. The board did not shout; it simply rearranged the price of everyone. Jansen's price rose on two lists, Abhishek's on one, Bavuma's on one. Nobody's price fell — and that is the update's largest failing. A table showing only climbers is not the full picture; it is a list of that week's headlines. Three things to watch over the next fortnight. First, the third Test, and Jansen's second spell in it — if his corridor percentage drops below the first two Tests and the top spot survives, then what the ranking showed was old weight rather than form. Second, Abhishek's first two innings against New Zealand — if his strike rate falls against spin and he stays at No. 1, then my belief that this ranking is fragile was wrong, and I will write it in next month's column. Third, the date of Ishan Kishan's return — that date will decide how many weeks this summit lasts. What does not come out of this update is who will be the best player next year. A table is a timestamp, not a forecast. And I have the timestamp recorded — that week in the middle of the third Test, when the top chair could shift in five days. When the next table lands, the first thing I will check is whether this week's three top names are still there. If they are not, the first paragraph of this piece becomes its own best evidence: a ranking is not a reward for performance but an echo of it, and an echo always arrives late, and never stays long.