Two Columns, One Name: Marco Jansen's Double Crown and Abhishek Sharma's Return

The rankings page is printed on the inside sheet nobody ever phones the desk to ask for. On Monday afternoon in the Kolkata press box I opened it for the third time — bowlers' column on top, all-rounders' beneath. Two separate tables, two separate arithmetics, and the same name at the head of both: Marco Jansen. That detail does not exist on any scorecard. South Africa beat Australia in a Test where Jansen's bat and ball both mattered, and by the next update the ICC Men's Player Rankings had him first among Test bowlers and first among Test all-rounders. In the same week Abhishek Sharma returned to the top of the T20I batting list. It was three in the morning before the copy finally made sense; all I knew was that one name sat in two columns, and that its meaning was larger than the table.

Jansen demands a different viewing habit. Six feet eight of left arm, giving bounce with the new ball and reverse with the old; a length that attacks a batsman's patience before it attacks his weakness. Across the last few seasons, on those Highveld and Cape Town pitches where the bounce is honest and the light is cold, the thing that kept returning to me was this: his ball is not the fastest, it is the least predictable. A Dale Steyn quote has travelled with this update, calling Jansen the best cricketer in the world. The praise reads warmly, but there is a cold fact inside it — a fast-bowling all-rounder is the scarcest and most expensive requirement in Test cricket. South Africa's domestic pipeline caught him early: a Dolphins product shaped in under-19 cricket as a left-arm seamer who was handed a batting card later. He was a bowler first and an all-rounder second.

The second story is the one television enlarged. Abhishek Sharma's hundred against New Zealand came off 35 balls, the innings ending on 113 from 38. In an innings like that the field is redrawn not by the batsman but by the bowler — fielders go back, and the ball still crosses the rope. On the strength of it he returned to No. 1 among T20I batters. In that same list Ishan Kishan held the top for a few weeks, and Travis Head reached the chair too. In the Test all-rounders' table, Ravindra Jadeja's four-year reign has now ended — and there lies the sharpest contrast between the two tables: four years in one place, several owners in the other.

The real subject here is not the ranking but the architecture of the ranking. The ICC all-rounder table is composite arithmetic: bowling points, batting points, and the balance between them. Jadeja held that summit for four years because his balance was built on subcontinental pitches — left-arm spin, a reliable lower-order bat, a long domestic season. Jansen's balance is of another species: he wins matches with the ball and changes their direction with the bat. A statistic is good when it asks a question and bad when it becomes the answer itself. This double crown asks one — a fast bowler reaching No. 1 among all-rounders is not an event in the table, it is an event in the structure, because every team needs that player and almost none can find him.

For South Africa the crown is a pleasant headache. In the World Test Championship points race Jansen is the man who must play every match, because without him the balance collapses. Playing every match means negotiating with knees, a back and a workload department. It is easy to demand that a player prove himself on return; the harder question is what the body paid. Jansen is still at the age when the body forgives — and that is the most dangerous sentence anyone can write about a fast bowler.

The rest of the table is a short ledger. Temba Bavuma's 179 levelled the series at 1-1 and lifted him up the list. Harry Brook, Scott Boland and Simon Harmer gained ground. In white-ball cricket there was movement around Sanju Samson, Finn Allen, Mitchell Santner, Arshdeep Singh and Ben Duckett. The ODI list carries Shaheen Afridi, Azmatullah Omarzai, Bernard Scholtz and Mohammad Nabi, with the Pakistan-England-Sri Lanka tri-series likely to register in the next update. Reading that list, an old habit returns — between the scorecard and the silence, a story was waiting, and it lived not in the numbers but in the speed at which they changed hands.

The uncomfortable question is this: does a crown that changes heads several times a year measure mastery, or merely matches played? The T20I table moves fastest because T20I cricket is played most — and India plays the most of it. The batsman with the most innings in a year is also the one most likely to accumulate points. Abhishek's hundred is real and so is his return; what the return does not say is that he is the world's best T20I batsman. It says that this week nobody held more points than he did. The numbers were honest; the men holding them were not. Jansen's double crown needs the same cold water. Steyn's sentence belongs to a moment, not a career; ranking arithmetic is built from recent form, not from a decade's quality. Since that night in 2026 I have kept one habit — never read the table before the scorecard, or you will see exactly what everyone else is seeing.

The real gap in collective memory is elsewhere. We will remember Jansen as the new fast-bowling all-rounder, when his significance is that he may be among the last of a generation the system no longer produces. Franchise cricket manufactures four-over bowlers and twenty-ball batsmen; the man who does both across five days was the gift of the old zonal selectors, whose chairs no longer appear on any board's list of priorities.

In a fortnight the table will move again. The question is not whether Jansen stays at No. 1; it is whether this doubleness is the start of a decade or the harvest of one series. The phone will ring again, the same grey sheet will reach the copy desk, and one name will carry two marks beside it. I am waiting for the morning when that doubleness starts to look ordinary — because only then will we know the game has moved on, and that we are still measuring it with old pages.