Marco Jansen's Two No. 1s, Abhishek Sharma's 38 Balls, and the Arithmetic the Rankings Sheet Leaves Out

Four forty-seven in the afternoon. The laptop was open and the ICC rankings sheet was on screen. I did not read it first. I copied it first. That is what you do with a scorebook too — enter the over, form the opinion later.

The sheet carried eight names. Three formats. Two No. 1 crowns changing hands. And one name sitting at No. 1 in two separate columns — Marco Jansen, first in Test bowling, first in Test all-rounders. I checked that number three times before I let myself write it down.

On the same sheet, second line: Abhishek Sharma, No. 1 T20I batter. His last innings read 113 off 38 balls. Strike rate 297.36. Six point two overs. A crown was settled in the time it takes a fast bowler to begin his second spell.

I opened a fresh page in my A5 notebook that evening. Date on top, eight names below, and one column beside them — format. I counted. Of the eight, five belonged to Test cricket, two to ODIs, and exactly one to T20Is.

A sheet that reads as though all three formats are shifting equally is, in fact, a Test cricket sheet. That is the first thing about this update that no headline will carry.

A No. 8's 85, and the arithmetic of the all-rounder table

Jansen's numbers are plain: 10 wickets in two Tests, 5/33 in one innings, and 85 runs from No. 8. The third Test between South Africa and Australia had not even finished when this sheet arrived.

The thing to hold on to is that the all-rounder rating is a sum of batting and bowling ratings together, which is why going up on both sides at once is brutally difficult for an all-rounder. That is what happened here. His bowling rating was already climbing; the 85 pushed the combined figure to the point where both columns showed a one.

An 85 from No. 8 moves an all-rounder table harder than an 85 from the top order, because there is no other batting rating to absorb it. This is where rankings arithmetic separates from cricket logic. On the field, a No. 8's 85 means the innings was rescued. On the table, it means a player has arrived at the door of two medals at once.

I will not read that 85 alone, though. The 5/33 sits next to it. And that raises the question that bothers me at every rankings update: a single innings occupies as much room on the table as a whole series. A 5/33 is one evening's work. Ten wickets is two matches. The rating files both in the same ledger, and we read them as though they were the same unit.

The third Test is live. Fast bowlers' numbers turn quickly in this series. Jansen's crown is not fragile because he is weak; it is fragile because the top of that table is crowded right now. When four bowlers sit inside a ten-point band, one innings changes everything. That is my judgment, not the table's fact, and I am filing it as such.

38 balls and a three-match crown

Abhishek's series read 29, 27, 113. The No. 1 came from the third innings. In the first two he was out for 56 runs across two visits. This is the nature of the T20I table — the fastest-moving of the three, because its sample is the smallest.

One thing is worth counting here. Abhishek had lost the top spot in July, when Ishan Kishan went past him. Ishan is now out of this series with an injury, and the crown is back with Abhishek. The position has changed hands twice in four months.

The faster a crown changes hands, the less it proves about the player holding it. That is not an argument against Abhishek — 113 off 38 balls is a rare innings in any format, and a strike rate above 297 is a claim in itself. It is an argument about the table. A T20I series is three matches. No. 1 is not a term of office; it is a three-match result.

I have no trouble writing that 113 (38) is the brightest figure on that sheet. The trouble is that we treat brightest as heaviest. Bright and heavy are different things, and a rankings update stacks them in the same column every time.

Five Tests, two ODIs, one T20I

Now the names pushed below the headline.

Temba Bavuma — up the Test batting table on the back of 179. Harry Brook — climbing in Test batting. Scott Boland — up in Test bowling. Simon Harmer — up in both Test bowling and all-rounders. Shaheen Shah Afridi — up in ODI bowling. Azmatullah Omarzai — up in ODI all-rounders.

Six names, plus the two above — eight in all. Five Tests, two ODIs, one T20I.

This is where the reader slips. A rankings update delivers three formats at once, in one list, in one tone. A reader will weigh Bavuma's 179 against Abhishek's 113 on the same scale, when the two sit in tables with different samples, different workloads and different velocities.

I wrote it in two columns in my notebook. Test on the left, limited-overs on the right. The Test column held five names arriving from a single series — South Africa against Australia. The limited-overs column held three names from three different places: the India–New Zealand T20I series, and the ODI tri-series running in Pakistan and the UAE.

More than half the weight on this sheet was decided by one result in one series. That is not a flaw; that is how rankings work. But it needs saying, because once you assume eight names came from eight separate fights, you read the table as broader than it is.

Bavuma's 179 should be read differently for the same reason. It is the score of a batter whose rating was already in the upper band, for whom one large innings nudges the table rather than lifting it. The same 85 moves Jansen far more, because the all-rounder table adds on both sides at once. One sheet, two arithmetics.

This is where an old mistake of mine belongs, because it is the same mistake. In February 2026 I went to the Bengaluru mega auction shadowing the Gujarat Titans with a 214-player spreadsheet of my own. My model flagged the top order as thin. Shubman Gill made 483 runs that season. I published the correction myself.

My posture on rankings is the same. The model points; the field corrects; I am obliged to write both.

What the sheet does not show

ICC rankings run on a rolling period. Every new match enters, an old one leaves, the weighting is fixed, and there is a minimum qualification of matches or innings before a player is rated at all. All of this is known. What gets printed is the result, never the sum.

A table is a result, not a sum. And you cannot form a judgment on a sum you have not seen — you can only trust it.

That is why my reading of any rankings update begins with three questions. First: how many matches of this player's were counted in this period? Second: how many were against whom, on what surfaces, in which conditions? Third: how much of this rise is one innings?

The third question matters most and gets asked least. In Jansen's case the 85 and the 5/33 both sit inside the same window. In Abhishek's case, 113 is one of three innings — a third of the case rests on a single knock. That does not diminish the innings. It changes how the rise should be understood.

In 2026, in the Navrangpura press box in Ahmedabad, I was the only woman in the room for Gujarat against Baroda. Eleven reporters, one power strip, and a senior man who asked whether I was there for the snacks. I kept my own ball-by-ball sheet across 214 overs and filed 900 words; the desk ran 250 under a shared byline.

Since that day I have had one rule: if I cannot record it, I cannot write it. Rankings updates are where that rule earns its keep, because half the job there is writing things down and the other half is leaving things out.

What gets misread from outside

The commonest misreading is that No. 1 means "the best in the world right now." It does not. It means: across the matches counted in the recent window, this player accumulated the most points. It is a ledger, not a verdict.

The second misreading costs more. We read rankings as prediction — "he is No. 1, so he will deliver next series." The table looks backwards. It tells you what happened yesterday; it does not answer for the day after.

The third misreading is the least visible and does the most damage. A table counts the innings somebody played, not the innings somebody survived. The No. 5 who absorbed 120 balls on a fourth-day turn and saved the game earns nothing on that sheet. The No. 8 who made 85 earns two crowns. Which contribution was larger is not a question the table is built to ask.

I learned this first in an empty stadium. January 2026, Ahmedabad, the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy — six venues, 26 days, 31 match reports, and roughly 132,000 empty seats at the Narendra Modi Stadium on final day. I had no corridors that month, so I worked on 6:40 a.m. calls, fifteen minutes each.

What I learned there was to read atmosphere in physical detail rather than numbers — the echo, the sweat, the silence on day three. A rankings table is the same. It is the noise. The echo is the real thing, and it is filed elsewhere.

One more count from this sheet: eight names, and zero women cricketers. Not because there is no women's table — there is, and it runs on a separate cycle. It is because we have built a habit in which the men's list is called "the rankings update" and the women's list is called "the women's rankings update." After the 2026 women's World Cup and three WPL seasons, the habit has not changed. I am filing this as a ledger entry, not a grievance: eight names, zero.

What to watch next

Jansen's bowling crown can move inside this very series — that is the table's own velocity, not a forecast.

What I will watch is not the No. 1. It is the gap. The narrower the points between first and second, the faster the crown turns over, and the less that crown says about the man wearing it. That becomes the first column of my next notebook page.

And one question to leave with this sheet: if Jansen takes two wickets tomorrow and slips to No. 2, will he be a lesser bowler tomorrow? If the answer is no, then what exactly are we asking this table to tell us — and why have we never asked where the things it does not count get written down?