Marco Jansen's Double Crown and Abhishek Sharma's Return: What the ICC Rankings Said, and What They Left Out

The man who walked out at No. 8 was six foot eight, and we noticed his shoulders before his bat. Marco Jansen's blade does not look like a fast bowler's bat; it looks like the bat of a man who stands for hours in the nets and then, in the middle, sends the ball past mid-wicket as though it were a formality. That innings had 85 in it, and the same series gave him ten wickets across two Tests — 5/33 in one, a spell in which not a single ball landed on the batsman's pads.

I sat down that evening with the scorecard. The scorecard had what scorecards always have: runs, wickets, overs, extras. But what surfaced the next morning was not a scorecard. It was a pair of scales. In the new ICC update, Jansen stood first among Test bowlers and first among Test allrounders. One morning, one man, two lists, the same name at the top of both.

The scoreboard is only the surface; beneath it, people change like seasons. To understand what shifted under the surface, you have to open the instrument and look at the weights — where they come from, who gets weighed, and who never reaches the platform at all.

A rating is a weighted average, not a shortcut. The ICC scores every performance, gives recent matches more weight, and lets older matches fade. The output is a rating; the position on the list is a ranking. The two are not the same thing, and that gap is where readers lose their footing. A batsman can hold 800 rating points across two different months and still slide from third to seventh, because someone else played better, or because a qualified player dropped below the minimum-match threshold.

Every ICC list has its own eligibility floor. A batsman needs a set number of innings to appear; a bowler needs a set number of overs. Which means, plainly: a ranking is not a record of a player's ability, it is a record of his availability and his calendar. The man who played more had more chances to bank points; the man who was injured or benched slipped down the list even if the ball left his hand exactly the same way.

The three formats sit on three separate lists, and this is where most confusion is born. Reading a Test bowling ranking beside a T20I batting ranking is like comparing a 100m time with a marathon time. The allrounder table is a stranger animal still: batting points and bowling points are added together, but a minimum standard must be met in both. That is why Jansen's 85 at No. 8 was not a decorative run-a-ball cameo. It was fuel for the allrounder table.

The news in this update is this: South Africa's Marco Jansen has moved to the top of both the Test bowling and Test allrounder lists, on the back of ten wickets in two Tests, a 5/33, and 85 from No. 8. On the other side, India's Abhishek Sharma has returned to the top of the T20I batting list after an innings of 113 off 38 balls, with Ishan Kishan's injury sharpening the context around that return. In between sit Temba Bavuma's 179, the rises of Harry Brook, Scott Boland, Simon Harmer, Shaheen Shah Afridi and Azmatullah Omarzai, and the backdrop of the ODI tri-series in Pakistan and the UAE.

Read together, the picture is clean: three formats, six countries, one week. But it is a roundup's picture, not an analysis. And the weakness of a roundup is structural — it tells you who climbed, not whether the climb will hold.

Jansen's story should be read through his work, not his height. When a six-foot-eight left-arm quick walks in at eight, the opposing captain's arithmetic breaks. You take the second new ball on the fourth morning expecting the tail to fold, and the man drives you through cover. The 85 was not merely runs; it was the part of the innings that let South Africa breathe under pressure.

Ten wickets in two Tests does not mean a bowler has been transformed; it means that what he did inside a two-Test window became the heaviest item in the ranking's arithmetic. In Test rankings, early in a series, one or two good spells move a player quickly, because the base of points is small. That is precisely why the picture can change after the second or third Test. This update itself carries the signal that the top two spots among Test bowlers could move soon — that is a projection, not a fact, and it deserves to be read as one.

For South Africa, the double crown confirms an old truth: their strength has never lived in spin, it has lived in fast-bowling depth. Jansen is not a new name inside that tradition, he is a new phase of it, because he is adding batting to bowling at a moment when runs from the lower order have become expensive again in Test cricket. When the top order is 40 for three, thirty runs from No. 8 are worth more than they were a decade ago.

From years of watching matches, one lesson holds: I trust the quiet bowler's third spell before the loud highlight reel. Jansen's real examination comes over the next six months — when he is tired, when the pitches are flat, when somebody else sits above him on a fresh list. Then we will learn whether this crown was built by craft or by the calendar.

Abhishek Sharma's story has to be read differently. 113 off 38 balls in T20I cricket means a boundary roughly every other delivery. An innings like that shows no visible strategy and no visible restraint, and that is the weapon. When a batsman scores at that rate, the bowler begins to change his plan, and the moment the plan changes, the length goes.

But the word "back" is hiding a great deal. "Takes back the crown" is newspaper language, not ranking arithmetic. A player moves up when his points rise — and it is equally possible for his position to improve because the man above him dropped out or lost older points. The context supplied with this update is that Ishan Kishan went past him in July, and that with Kishan injured, the availability arithmetic has swung back toward Abhishek. That injury is not good news. It is simply how the list works.

There is a gap between the innings and the position, and it is worth filling. A T20I ranking does not tell you how that player will fare in the 50-over game, or whether he will get the chance at all. The India–New Zealand T20I series matters here because it shows how decisive this run of Abhishek's is strictly inside the T20 boundary. The top of a list opens a door; it does not decide which room lies behind it.

Temba Bavuma's 179 is the part of this update that received the least space. The pressure on him as captain does not show up in numbers — it shows up in the phase of captaincy when a team is changing and every series is being called a series of transition. A 179 in that weather is not simply runs; it pauses the argument inside the team for a week. His rise in the batting rankings is the price of that pause.

The remaining names — Harry Brook, Scott Boland, Simon Harmer, Shaheen Shah Afridi, Azmatullah Omarzai — form the second line of this list, and for me the second line is the interesting one. Bowlers like Boland and Harmer belong to the category selectors see late and teams forget early. Harmer's spin, Boland's seam-hitting line: there is no market for these, no bidding. Yet the rankings are lifting them, which is proof that arithmetic can occasionally be more honest than cricket.

Shaheen Shah Afridi and Azmatullah Omarzai rise against the ODI tri-series in Pakistan and the UAE. One-day cricket is passing through the phase where it holds neither the gravity of Tests nor the glow of T20. Triangulars have become nearly invisible — a few matches, a few cities, and nobody remembers who won the final. When a bowler takes five wickets in such a series, the effect reaches the rankings but not the memory of a cricket lover.

The empty stadium taught me that silence files its own match report. That report never reaches print. Mitchell Starc, Matt Henry, Ollie Robinson, Jasprit Bumrah and Ravindra Jadeja appear in this update as the fixed points against which the climb is measured. Someone goes up, someone slides; that is not bad news, that is what a scale does.

Now the part that goes missing from roundups of this kind. A ranking does not say which pitch a man played on, which attack he faced, under what pressure — and that is its largest limit. Ten wickets on a bouncing South African surface and ten wickets on a flat subcontinental surface are nearly identical in the ranking's eye. That asymmetry bothers me every time, because it penalises the bowlers who work in the hardest conditions.

The second absence: the women's rankings. The ICC updates three men's lists every week, while the women's tables move to a different rhythm, on a different pattern, with different coverage. After the 2026 World Cup was won, we all asked one question — what happens next? Part of the answer is this: ranking tables are standing evidence of who is given prominence. The day a paragraph on the women's rankings appears naturally inside a men's rankings story, that argument will have moved forward.

The third thing readers forget most often: a ranking tells you who is playing well these days, not who is great. Greatness is counted in series won, in standing at the crease during the pressure overs, in the innings that saves a team from defeat. A ranking is one corner of that.

I covered the Ranji Trophy final in Indore in 2026, when Gujarat chased 312 with five wickets down and won a first title in 67 years. What never enters any ranking table from that match was the silence of the dressing room afterwards — the hour after the cameras left, when nobody was speaking. That same year I began an online column in which I decided to give those small sounds space ahead of the scorecard.

Watching the Under-19 World Cup final at Mount Maunganui in 2026 felt the same. I went looking for a scoreline and found boys learning how to become. Shubman Gill made 372 runs in that tournament, and the unburdened ease in his cover drive cannot be captured by any list. Comparing it with the senior team's pressure is easy, but the real point was a network working quietly underneath — trials, academy fees, franchise scouting — which surfaces in a ranking table only as a final result.

Here is the third, unstated face of this update. Jansen and Abhishek are in the headlines today, but beneath them sits an entire layer — the names scoring runs in provincial cricket with no notice at all. The list we read every week shows only those who have reached the top of the staircase. Nobody keeps the ledger for the rest of the stairs.

Some matches are not won; they are remembered into shape. The same happens to rankings. We do not remember old tables — we remember them later, to suit ourselves, usually forgetting who was playing on what surface at the time.

Which brings us forward. The third Test of the South Africa–Australia series is still running, and this update has arrived in the middle of it. That means the picture visible today may be stale within a week. Jansen's double crown is a historical fact, not a claim of permanence. If he takes two wickets in the next Test and slips to second on the next list, the quality of his bowling will not have changed by a single point.

For Abhishek Sharma, the real question is not whether he is first. It is which basis the selectors will use when Ishan Kishan is fit again — the ranking, or the team balance they are actually hunting for. A ranking is a piece of paper on a selector's desk; it is not the decision.

When I began in journalism in 2026, ranking tables arrived once a month in a magazine and people cut them out and kept them. Today they arrive weekly and are forgotten weekly. Information has grown; attention has not.

One image from Jansen's innings stays with me — after sending the ball toward cover he takes two steps, stops, and looks back, as though locating his place in an old ground. No ranking will record that moment. Perhaps that is just as well. Rankings are for those who count; the moment is for those who watch.

The question is not who stood on top of Monday's list. The question is whether, the next time the scale tips, someone will read out the name of a player we have never yet seen. That is the game's real hope, and it is the one story the rankings will never carry.