One Ranking, Two Mechanics: What Marco Jansen's and Abhishek Sharma's No. 1 Spots Actually Measure

One Ranking, Two Mechanics: What Marco Jansen's and Abhishek Sharma's No. 1 Spots Actually Measure

Hook: The 85 that did more than the 5/33

Marco Jansen is the world's No. 1 Test bowler. The sentence reads cleanly until you look at its foundation. He has ten wickets from two Tests, a 5/33 in one innings, and 85 runs batting at No. 8. Three numbers. None of them on its own proves he is the best bowler in the world — that claim is manufactured by putting all three together inside a specific mathematical window.

The real anomaly isn't in the wickets. It's in the batting order. In the same week, Jansen also went to No. 1 in the Test allrounder table. A man who bats at eight became the world's leading allrounder — a category traditionally reserved for players who bat in the top order and bowl as well.

In the same week, Abhishek Sharma returned to No. 1 among T20I batters with 113 off 38 balls. Do the arithmetic: 113 runs, 38 balls, a strike rate of 297.37. Two entire Test matches on one side, a single innings on the other. Both produced a No. 1 ranking. One system, two completely different mechanics. That is the least discussed and most instructive thing about this rankings update.

The headlines tell you who moved up. They do not tell you how long it took, what sample he climbed on, or whether he stays there.

Context: A rating is not an average, and that is the whole argument

I left a print desk at a Gujarat daily in 2026 to follow the numbers, and the numbers brought me here. One habit I have never broken since then: I do not write a claim without a sample size attached. ICC rankings generate a headline every time, and every time the real question gets skipped — what exactly is a rating?

A batting average is a simple thing: runs divided by dismissals. A rating is not. A rating is a weighted average in which three forces act at once.

First, the rolling window. Under the ICC's published methodology, performances over the past few years are counted, with the most recent twelve months carrying the heaviest weight — roughly half. The direct consequence is that a rating is a moving window, not a certificate. The innings that puts you at No. 1 today will drop out of that window next year and your score will fall with it, without you playing badly.

Second, quality of opposition. Wickets against a strong batting line-up earn more points than wickets against a weak one. This is necessary, and it is still an estimate — the model does not know what mood the opposing side was in, or what the pitch was doing.

Third, and this is where Jansen's No. 1 begins to make sense — the allrounder rating is not a separate calculation. Under the ICC method it is built from the batting rating multiplied by the bowling rating, divided by a thousand. In plain English: the allrounder table rewards balance, not brilliance.

Here is a worked example I keep in my worksheet. A player with a batting rating of 800 and a bowling rating of 800 produces 640,000, divided by 1,000, which is 640 points. A second player with a bowling rating of 950 and a batting rating of 500 produces 475,000, which is 475. The first is not better at anything than the second, but he is the top allrounder. The maths is deliberate. The problem is that nobody reading the table knows it.

There is a fourth point that never reaches the headline — volatility changes with format. In T20I, a batter faces few balls per innings, so the rating sample is small and a single innings can lift a player three or four places. In Tests, a match contains two innings and a hundred-plus overs, so movement is slow. ODIs sit between them — fifty overs, three hundred balls, the most balanced sample of the three.

For a reader who only watches ICC events, define the term first: a rating is not a count of wickets or runs. It is a weighted index with no absolute meaning. Nine hundred points says nothing by itself; it only says you are ahead of the others inside that window.

Core: Two No. 1s and the distance between them

Jansen's 85: the runs the ranking cannot see

Start with what I cannot extract from this material. I cannot tell you Jansen's bowling average, because the available detail records only the 5/33 and not the runs conceded in the other innings. When a full scorecard is missing, I slow the article down. I write the number that is visible and leave space for the one that isn't.

What is visible is this: ten wickets in two Tests, an average of five wickets per match. That is good, but it is not the best in the world — several bowlers take five a Test in any given year. So where did No. 1 come from?

The answer is in the 85, and this is where the system shows its deepest flaw. The rating system does not know what position a batter occupies. It sees runs, it sees the strength of the opposing attack, and it converts them into points. But 85 from No. 8 and 85 from No. 4 are not the same thing to a team.

I learned that lesson in 2026, when my outlet sent me to the Russia World Cup as its data correspondent and I built a model across all 64 matches. The takeaway was that no model is more honest than its inputs. France won their knockout games with lower expected goals than their opponents, because they won on efficiency rather than dominance. The cricket translation is straightforward — a rating measures efficiency, but a team's definition of efficiency shifts with the situation.

Eighty-five at No. 8 means you held an innings together after the middle order fell, that you built a partnership with the lower order, that you pushed the scoreboard into a position from which the bowlers could attack. The ranking sees none of that. It counts runs.

That is not a fault, it is a boundary — and boundaries need stating, because when you see one man topping both the bowling and allrounder tables your brain builds a single story. In fact they are two separate calculations that happen to have converged on the same person.

There is a third thing no table records. What did Jansen's No. 1 bowling spot depend on that week? Not that he is the best bowler alive, but that he was playing. Availability is an input nobody pays for in the rankings. Mitchell Starc, Matt Henry, Ollie Robinson, Jasprit Bumrah, Ravindra Jadeja — several names in that conversation played fewer matches inside the window. A player who does not play does not gain rating points; he only loses them more slowly.

Abhishek's 113: the economics of thirty-eight balls

On the other side sits Abhishek Sharma, and here the maths changes completely.

Thirty-eight balls, 113 runs, a strike rate of 297.37. The first reaction is that this was a special innings. Fine — it was. But from a data desk I would ask three questions the headline does not.

First, the series context. According to the source, his scores in this stretch were 29, 27 and 113. One large innings, two ordinary ones. The series average works out at 56.33, which looks excellent and rests entirely on a single knock. The structural weakness of a T20I rating is exactly this — it averages three innings inside one window, and the biggest innings outweighs everything else.

Second, the match situation. A 297.37 strike rate is a fact; whether those 38 balls came inside the powerplay or in the death overs is not in the material. Thirty-eight balls in the first six overs and thirty-eight balls at the end are not the same currency. The model cannot answer that question, and it is the most important question there is.

Third, and least discussed — why the No. 1 arrived. The source is explicit that Ishan Kishan was injured and that the vacancy is what opened the door. This is not the fruit of a selection decision; it is the fruit of an absence. Thirty years of newsroom memory tells me India's bench strength was never a talent problem. It is a selection problem. In the franchise era, scouting now does what zonal selectors once did, which is why a squad announcement should be read as a record of decision-making rather than a shortage of players.

On injury, since it lands on my desk more than any other subject: return timelines are managed by PR teams. When a statement says a player will be assessed week to week, that is not a medical document. This rankings update carries no detail on Kishan's injury — no date, no diagnosis, no return estimate. That is not a gap in reporting; it is the absence of information. And while it is absent, Abhishek's No. 1 cannot be treated as permanent.

The rest of the list: when a headline stays a headline

The other half of a rankings roundup is breadth. Temba Bavuma's 179 moved the Test batting table, Harry Brook climbed, Scott Boland and Simon Harmer rose in the bowling list, Shaheen Shah Afridi and Azmatullah Omarzai moved in ODIs.

Bavuma's 179 is the most solid number in the whole set, because it is one innings in one Test that does not need to be pushed through a window to be read — a captain's 179 means something directly. Boland's rise is interesting precisely because he is a specialist who plays intermittently and builds a high rating on a small sample; that is the case where a short sample flatters most. Harmer fits the same pattern.

Shaheen and Omarzai have the ODI tri-series in Pakistan and the UAE behind them. Note the structural point: ODI movement is the most damped and Test movement the slowest. A reader who treats all three tables with one eye will be misled by that difference alone. A report that handles Tests, ODIs and T20Is in one breath places a burden on the reader that it never discloses.

Methodology box: what the model cannot see

Sources: ICC rankings update (the original material carries no publication date and no ranking period), plus match figures — Jansen's two Tests, ten wickets, 5/33 and 85; Abhishek's 29-27-113; Bavuma's 179.

Sample: two Tests for Jansen, three T20I innings for Abhishek. This is small, and that is the most decisive fact in the whole report.

What the model cannot see: batting position, pitch behaviour, match state, when in an innings a spell was bowled, fielding, and the difference between a 5/33 on a green top and a 5/33 on a flat deck in the fourth innings.

What I cannot report: the source is undated, the rankings are live, and the third Test is in progress. Using any of this without a timestamp is a technical error.

Contrarian: a ranking mirrors yesterday, it does not forecast tomorrow

This is where I have to disagree with my own trade.

The implicit story in any rankings roundup runs performance → ranking movement → headline. It is clean, linear and thoroughly misleading. A ranking change is not the direct result of a performance; it is one variable entering a weighted average. And one variable entering a weighted average is often the consequence of another variable leaving the window.

Correlation is not causation. That sentence is not this article's centre. It is its limit, and I want to keep it as a limit, because anyone who makes it the centre is building a brand rather than an argument.

The boring consensus is correct here. Abhishek made 113, so his rating rose. Jansen took ten wickets and made 85, so his rating rose. There is nothing to reverse. The real question is not why a rating moved but whether it holds.

And on that, the original material cuts its own throat. It concedes that the top two Test bowling spots could change quickly. That is an honest sentence, and it means the headline — No. 1 bowler — may be stale within a week. A headline that concedes its own expiry date should be read with exactly that much strength.

Then the vocabulary. The headline says Abhishek took the crown back. The source confirms Ishan Kishan overtook him in July, which establishes that Abhishek was at No. 1 and slipped. But back requires his full ranking history — when he first reached No. 1, how long he stayed, in which format. That record is not here. Back is a story word, not a data word.

The batting-position blindness I raised earlier is the largest technical flaw. The ranking cannot see that the 85 came at eight. That is not a trivial omission. A No. 8 is never a team's main batter; his job is to build a partnership after the top order has gone. What those 85 runs did to the team total is not recorded anywhere in the table. When a number says more about a player than it says about his team, the problem is in the instrument.

There is a wider gap in the list: no women's rankings appear. I won't call that a crime, but it is an information gap that trains a specific habit in readers — that world rankings mean whatever is happening in men's cricket. As a 46-year-old woman in this industry, I have seen that gap often enough that accepting it quietly now feels wrong.

And the most technical point of all — the lag. A rating mirrors a window that has already closed. When Bumrah returns from injury he will not need the time a new bowler needs to reach No. 1, because his old innings are still inside the window. A young bowler needs two unbroken years. A career is decided as much by when you played as by how you played, and that inequality is what we call a ranking.

Takeaway: what to watch in the next round

The third Test is in progress, which is the best news available — the next data point already exists.

The real test of Jansen's No. 1 is not whether he takes five wickets on a different pitch. It is whether the 85 can be repeated, because that is the number that put him top of the allrounder table. Something that happens once is counted. Something that happens twice becomes a trait.

For Abhishek the question is clean and, I think, will become the most interesting selection question of the coming months: Kishan will return, and then Abhishek has to stay at No. 1 — not in the XI, in the table. His ranking rests on a vacancy, and vacancies get filled.

I left print to follow the numbers and they brought me here, but they never once told me how long Jansen stays on top. That answer is in the over count, not the headline.

The question is whether any player gets a second week in his career where his bowling and his batting both deliver a top spot at once — or whether the system weights such weeks so heavily that they end up standing in for the whole career.