Jansen's Double Crown, Abhishek's Return: The Table's Verdict and the Field's Witness

Ahmedabad, 6:40 in the morning. The ICC Men's Player Rankings page is open on the laptop and I have read the same column three times. Batsmen at the top, bowlers below, all-rounders wedged in between. One name in all three — Marco Jansen. This is the kind of morning where it feels as though cricket has produced a record, when in fact a spreadsheet has simply finished its work.

In Test cricket, one man holding No. 1 among bowlers and No. 1 among all-rounders at the same time is what a bulletin calls a double delight. It followed a match-winning performance against Australia. The same bulletin carries Abhishek Sharma's return to the top of the T20I batting list — a 35-ball century against New Zealand, an innings of 113 off 38.

Two players, two formats, one table. For nine years I have read that table the way people read a court order: date first, then the section, then the sentence printed in small type at the bottom. This bulletin has no date. The section has a name but no number. And at the bottom sits the line that made me write this piece — Dale Steyn saying Jansen is the best cricketer in the world.

The footnote was small; the consequence was the whole table.

Context: what the table is, and which rule it obeys

The ICC player rankings are not a vote. They are a weighted average — every innings and every spell does not carry equal value, recent form weighs more, old form weighs less. The scale runs roughly 0 to 1000, and crossing 900 is considered exceptional. A bowler earns points for wickets, but not by the plain arithmetic of a scorecard: cheap wickets and expensive wickets are weighted differently, and the strength of the opposition is counted.

Here is the first footnote. To be ranked at all, you must qualify. Not every innings counts. A batter must have played a minimum number of innings; a bowler must have bowled in a minimum number. Which means one explosive innings does not put you on the list, and one poor tour does not remove you from it. The list runs on memory, not headlines.

The all-rounder table works differently, and that is the root of this entire story. The all-rounder rating is derived from the product of the batting and bowling ratings — the two multiplied and divided by a thousand. Multiplication means a weak column destroys the total. A man with a bowling rating of 800 and a batting rating of 350 lands somewhere near 280 on the all-rounder index; a world-class bowler becomes invisible on that list.

Which is why the all-rounder's crown is the hardest in cricket and the least understood. It does not go to the man who does one thing at 95 per cent. It goes to the man who does two things at 70 per cent each, repeatedly, in every season, on every surface.

Ravindra Jadeja wore that crown for four years. Think about what four years means: a period in which a player's form, fitness, selection status and home-away conditions turn over three times. For Jadeja it meant his batting rating never fell far enough to break the product. For Jansen it means he has done what fast bowlers rarely do — made enough runs at eight to keep the second column from looking empty.

Core: one match, two columns

The Australia performance is described in the bulletin as match-winning. In ranking arithmetic that phrase has a hard meaning: enough wickets and enough runs in a single match to shove the weighted average past the point where six months of small innings fall behind. This is where the table and the scorecard part company. The scorecard says what you did; the table says how much your work was counted for.

Jansen's double crown is rare because it usually belongs to a batter in the top six. Jansen bats lower. His crown was built with the ball and preserved by the product. The day his batting rating sags, his place on the all-rounder list will wobble even while he remains the No. 1 bowler. That contradiction is not a feature of the table, it is a flaw — but the flaw is instructive. The all-rounder crown measures utility, not craft.

Steyn's line sits above the arithmetic. A former fast bowler who once topped this very table is saying Jansen is the best cricketer in the world. The sentence is generous and it is a peer's opinion, not a measurement. I have no quarrel with Steyn saying it. I have a quarrel with a bulletin printing it beside the mathematics as though the two were the same species of evidence.

South Africa's fast bowlers have an old claim on this list — Steyn, Vernon Philander, Kagiso Rabada, three different crafts, three men who each saw the top of the bowling table. Jansen joins that lineage with a left-arm angle and height, and his gift is not Steyn's. Steyn changed the ball in the air; Jansen rotates it off the surface and swings a bat at eight. The ranking evaluates those two things separately, which is exactly why it can seat him at the top of two lists.

One more footnote, because Indian coverage gets this wrong weekly: the ICC player rankings and the World Test Championship points table are separate documents. One is a weighted average of individual numbers; the other is a points system built on team results. Jansen's double crown gives his side no WTC points. Coverage that misses the distinction manufactures a new story every week, and that story has no document behind it.

Core: the testimony of 35 balls

Abhishek's story carries three numbers and each says something different. The century came off 35 balls. The innings was 113 off 38. Which means that after reaching three figures he faced three more balls and made thirteen runs. That is not evidence of pace, it is evidence of intent. A batter who keeps striking at the same rate after a hundred knows exactly when his job ends — that is the current definition of T20 batting.

The innings returned him to No. 1 among T20I batters. According to the bulletin, Ishan Kishan took that spot from him in July, with Travis Head also in the race. There is a documentary problem worth recording: the bulletin says in one place that Abhishek first reached No. 1 in July 2026, and in another that Kishan replaced him "in July this year". Both cannot be true inside the same year, and the bulletin carries no publication date. A report without a date is not a table, it is a rumour.

The No. 1 T20I batting spot is the most volatile summit in the sport, and the reason is the calendar rather than the cricket. A Test series runs four or five matches, so a rating builds slowly and breaks slowly. India plays T20I bilaterals all year — every series is a fresh sample, every sample a fresh trend. The format with the most matches produces the least durable No. 1. That is not the table's fault; it is the fault of a calendar somebody signed off on.

The real test for Abhishek is not the summit. It is whether he can reproduce that strike rate away from the subcontinent, on quick, bouncing pitches. The rankings do not account for conditions; they account for opposition strength. That is the door they leave open.

Core: the rest of the table

The third block of the bulletin is ranking movement, and it is the part that ages fastest. Temba Bavuma's 179 and a 1-1 series sit here. Harry Brook climbed, Scott Boland and Simon Harmer moved. On the T20I side: Sanju Samson, Finn Allen, Mitchell Santner, Arshdeep Singh. On the ODI side: Ben Duckett, Shaheen Afridi, Azmatullah Omarzai, Bernard Scholtz, Mohammad Nabi, alongside the Pakistan-England-Sri Lanka tri-series.

One way to read that list is as testimony about speed. ODI rankings move slowest, for the obvious reason that a month can hold as many T20Is as a year holds ODIs. Fewer matches means each innings weighs more and change arrives late. More matches means faster movement and bigger headlines.

The names I find most interesting are the ones that did not climb but stayed. Holding a ranking is as hard as reaching it, because a weighted average demands every week what you delivered last year. That is not a demand of the game. It is a demand of the mathematics.

Contrarian: three holes in the table

The first hole is the most obvious and the least discussed. The bulletin publishes no ratings points at all. Positions, yes; margins, no. Without margins you cannot tell whether Jansen arrived at the top or defended it, how far Abhishek left second place behind, how large Brook's jump was. A five-hundred-word report with twenty names and not one number is not information. It is a list.

The second hole is Steyn's quote. "Best cricketer in the world" is a sentence that fits every table and proves none. The product formula is difficult; a clean quote is easy. So the quote was printed where the explanation should have been. That is a coverage habit — where the explanation is hard, praise gets published instead.

The third hole is the deepest, and it lives inside the formula. Multiplication rewards breadth, not height. A man who does two things competently outranks a man who does one thing magnificently. That preference has never been argued in public. Nobody at a press conference has asked what the standard is for calling a No. 8 batter the best cricketer in the world. I raised the question three times in my own office and got the same answer each time: that is how the table is built.

An old argument returns here — what began as a lost argument became a rules-only archive. My objection is not that the ranking is wrong. My objection is that it is presented as a law when it is a choice: a committee decided the all-rounder index would be a product, and that choice decided which player would appear at the top. Treating it as natural is the same error as treating playing conditions as weather.

And a fourth point, dropped quietly: the rankings do not know about conditions. Three wickets in a Cape Town gale and three on a slow Kolkata pitch are not the same, yet the table counts them as near enough. Until that distinction is recorded, every "No. 1 bowler" carries an invisible asterisk nobody prints.

Takeaway

Two things are worth watching. First, Jansen's subcontinental tour: if his batting rating falls there, the all-rounder crown will move even while he remains the No. 1 bowler, and the question will become whether the crown belonged to a player or to a formula. Second, Abhishek's next overseas series: whether that strike rate survives quick pitches is a question for scorecards, not tables.

And one suggestion I repeat with every rankings bulletin: print the points beside the position. A table with points can be audited; a table with positions can only be read. A replay can reopen a question the scoreline tried to close — the same applies here. The day a bulletin carries the date, the points and the margins together, it will be news. Until then it is a good list and an unfinished document.