ICC Rankings: Starc's No.1 Is a Snapshot, Not a Verdict — the Real Story Is Jansen's Career-Best All-Rounder Rating

At Newlands in Cape Town, Mitchell Starc took nine wickets and reclaimed the No.1 spot in the ICC Test bowling rankings. The headline writes itself: pacer back at No.1. Two lines deeper in the same release sits the sentence almost nobody picked up. Marco Jansen, with three wickets, slipped from No.1 to No.2 in the bowling table and simultaneously extended his lead at the top of the all-rounder rankings to a career-best rating.

One release, two opposite stories. The first belongs to a single match. The second belongs to a profile. Newsrooms take the first because it contains the words “No.1”; the second only contains a number. I start with the number.

Before reading any ranking, it helps to know what the table is and is not. It is not a plain average of runs and wickets. It is a weighted formula — opponent strength, match recency and volume of output all feed in. Pitch behaviour does not feed in. Innings context does not feed in. Home-versus-away does not carry separate weight. The consequence is direct: a spinner's six wickets on a fourth-day surface at Newlands and a fast bowler's three on a flat deck can land in roughly the same place on the formula's ledger.

This particular release prints three separate tables — Test, ODI and T20I — side by side. The first job is to read them as three documents, not one round-up.

The real context is what has happened to the top of the Test bowling table this year. Starc ended Jasprit Bumrah's reign in August. The chair then passed to Jansen. Then it came back to Starc. The No.1 position has changed hands at least three times in a short window.

On the other side sits South Africa, which occupies the most space in this release and will be discussed the least. Simon Harmer climbed nine places to seventh, one spot ahead of Kagiso Rabada. Ryan Rickelton jumped twenty-five places to 23rd, Aiden Markram sits 11th, Wiaan Mulder 17th. In one series, South African names have risen across the batting, bowling and all-rounder tables.

One receipt is worth filing here, because I read the release twice. It states that Harmer's six wickets bowled South Africa to a series triumph, while the same release sources Starc's nine wickets to the Cape Town Test. Both can only be true if South Africa won the series and Australia won the final Test. That reading places Starc's nine wickets in a match that did not decide the series. The detail never reaches the headline, and it matters more than anything else in pricing the No.1 tag. I am treating it as pending verification, not as a conclusion.

First finding: Starc's No.1 is real but not durable. Nine wickets is a superb match. But the top of this table is a room whose door opens every series. When Bumrah, Starc and Jansen have all held No.1 within a few months, the table is thin evidence for calling anyone the best Test bowler in the world. It tells you whose arithmetic is highest this week; it does not tell you who will be highest in two years.

Second finding, and the least-reported fact in the release: Jansen is its most undervalued figure. He lost the bowling chair and held the all-rounder top spot at a career-best rating. In Test cricket that gap matters. A pure No.1 bowler hands his team one weapon. A No.1 all-rounder hands his team an extra slot — a fifth bowler and a seventh batter in one name. When he climbs the all-rounder table in a match where he took only three wickets, the message is that his batting half absorbs the variance in his bowling half. That profile is scarce, and it is why he lives in two tables at once.

Third: Harmer's nine-place jump is weather, not form. Six wickets in a second innings at Newlands is the story of a surface that opens up for spin on days four and five. The formula does not weight which innings, which surface and which batter the wickets came against. Harmer's seventh therefore slightly overstates his neutral-conditions standing. Rabada slipping one place below him may hint that his wicket volume is running under his career norm — but I will say plainly that the release carries no Rabada wicket data. That is inference, not finding.

Fourth: South Africa's real win is collective. Three batters (Markram, Mulder, Rickelton), two bowlers (Harmer, Rabada) and one all-rounder (Jansen) rising together is the picture of a structure, not a one-man team. That signal is more durable than any single No.1. This release, to me, is about the South African Test side far more than it is about Starc.

Fifth: rankings track individual volume, not team results. India won in New Zealand and New Zealand players still climbed — Jacob Duffy up twenty-three places. That is not a contradiction; it is the formula working as designed. A bowler on the losing side still takes wickets, and the table counts exactly that. Likewise Shreyas Iyer reached seventh among T20I batters, and Afghanistan's Azmatullah Omarzai sits third among T20I all-rounders. Two separate stories, not two branches of one headline.

Sixth: Pakistan's ODI surge is a calendar effect. Shaheen Afridi, Haris Rauf and Fakhar Zaman rising together is what happens when a home or neutral tri-series hands out a large block of matches. It is evidence of scheduling advantage more than of form. I hand-coded 1,240 deliveries from India's 2026 England tour, and that exercise taught me the standing rule: until you state the sample size and the conditions it was gathered in, a number is the beginning of an argument, not the end of one. West Indies winning in Mirpur, with Justin Greaves, Jomel Warrican and Roston Chase climbing, sits inside the same rule.

Seventh, and the one that matters most: jumps of +25 and +23 are arithmetic, not revolution. When the base is small and the points are tightly packed, one match moves a player ten to twenty-five places. Reading Rickelton's +25 or Duffy's +23 as “these players have changed” is the mistake that gets repeated on every release. I coded 1,240 deliveries because the eye lies about momentum, and the eye lies about rankings just as fluently.

Now the part where I argue against myself. I have just said Starc's No.1 is weak evidence. The mainstream case, at full strength, is this: nine wickets are nine wickets in any conditions. An experienced fast bowler taking wickets in both innings of a deciding Test is a genuine signal of a late-career second wind, and if you label every No.1 “unstable” you will never credit anyone's rise. That objection is fair, and I accept it fully.

My answer is that I am not questioning Starc's skill. I am questioning the table's claim. Those are different things. My second weakness is that I am drawing conclusions across three formats from one release, and that may be my error — extracting three verdicts from a formula whose weighting nobody has published is inference dressed as a receipt. Lines describing Shreyas Iyer as India captain or Shaheen Afridi as Pakistan skipper are also lines I will not carry forward unverified.

Where this thesis breaks: if Starc holds the top spot through the next two Test series and Jansen keeps sliding to third or fourth in the bowling table, my revolving-door argument is wrong — and I will write that in the same thread rather than deleting it.

I have a date. If Starc takes fewer than 12 wickets across his next three Test innings and the No.1 changes hands again, the top of this table is unstable and the point is proven. If he takes more than 15 and holds the chair, I throw my entire framework out. In the meantime, whichever ranking you read, ask one question: which pitch, which innings and which opponent produced this number? If there is no answer, it is a news item. It is not a verdict.