ICC Rankings: Marco Jansen No. 1 in Test Bowling and All-Rounding; Abhishek Sharma Back on Top in T20Is

On a rankings sheet, the eye goes to the number first and the name only afterwards. It is an old habit: I pencil a small mark in the corner beside any name that appears twice in the same week. This time Marco Jansen is in two places — first among Test bowlers, and first among Test all-rounders. Both columns are printed on one page, with four lines between them. Sitting on top of both the ball and the bat lists in the same week is rare enough in Test cricket that the finger stops on its own. Lower down the same sheet, Abhishek Sharma is back at No. 1 among T20I batters — 113 off 38 balls against New Zealand, including a 35-ball hundred.

For South Africa, the Test against Australia was not just another match. In a series played under the World Test Championship, Jansen's bowling proved the spell that turned the game, and this ICC update shows the arithmetic of it. The tall left-arm quick, called a "beanpole" in the original report, now sits at the top of the Test bowling table. A line from Dale Steyn is travelling with the same update, calling Jansen the best cricketer in the world. It is a colourful sentence and it draws attention, but it should not be read as a verdict — it is a former player's opinion, not a scale.

The biggest story on this sheet may not be the one in the headline. Ravindra Jadeja's four-year run at the top of the Test all-rounder rankings is over, and Jansen has taken that chair. Four years pass not like a statistic but like a habit — a few overs every series, a few runs every innings — and only when the sequence breaks do you understand how much time it was holding. The maidan taught me that every number arrives with dust on its boots. Those four years are the ledger of that dust.

Abhishek's return should be read differently. He first reached the top of the T20I batting list in July 2026; in between, Ishan Kishan took that rung, and now it belongs to Abhishek again. Travis Head also touched the top in the same stretch. Three different names on that chair in a matter of months is not the story of one player's flight or fall — it is the story of how that list is built.

The all-rounder table is not an award for all-rounders. It is a composite index built by adding two separate ratings, batting and bowling, which means staying high in both at once. The pressure of a hundred on one side, the labour of twenty overs in an innings on the other — and both held together inside the same week. For Jansen, the double No. 1 is less a story of speed than of balance, and of a team willing to hand him the new ball and the old one. A player given both jobs usually ends up with numbers smaller than his ability, because fatigue is never recorded anywhere.

The T20I batting list is the most volatile of the three, and the reason is the calendar, not form. A Test series runs five matches and the points settle slowly. The T20I schedule is scattered — one team sits idle for months, another plays three games in a week. In that arrangement, one innings of 38 balls can move a player two or three rungs. On the night I watched that innings, what stayed with me had little to do with cricket: from the third ball the bowler was already changing his line, and it was the body language, not the scoreboard, that announced whose evening it was. Statistics are just footprints; the poem is the animal that made them.

The ODI list is being moved by something else. The tri-series between Pakistan, England and Sri Lanka hands three teams a concentrated block of fixtures inside a few days, and such weeks show up quickly in the rankings. Shaheen Afridi, Azmatullah Omarzai, Ben Duckett and Arshdeep Singh write their names into that movement. I learned to read the table like weather — not verdict, but pressure gathering. That pressure explains why ten days of a tournament can do what a whole bilateral season does not.

There is one more thing on that sheet that usually goes unread. Bernard Scholtz of Namibia and Mohammad Nabi of Afghanistan are listed in a table that also carries India and Australia. It is perhaps the only place in the world where those four share a column, with no broadcast contract attached.

Among the Test names, Temba Bavuma's 179 is the heaviest of a series that finished 1-1 — the same series that lifted Jansen also lifted Bavuma. Both sides of a ground produce names that move up, and that is the most honest thing about a rankings system: it counts the loser too. Harry Brook, Scott Boland and Simon Harmer are the other significant movers in this update. In T20Is, Sanju Samson, Finn Allen, Mitchell Santner and Arshdeep Singh have all shifted positions.

Now the part where I have to disagree with the headline. Words like "double delight" and "return" read well, but they do not take on the job of saying how much of a climb to the top is somebody else not playing. Whether Jadeja's four-year reign was taken from him or broke against his own calendar is something the rankings sheet will never tell us. Rankings award availability as generously as performance, and that is an argument that can survive a selector's disagreement. In the same way, Abhishek's "return" is better read as a stop on a carousel rather than a restoration — until one player gets an uninterrupted run of matches, that chair is nobody's estate.

And what is nowhere on the sheet is tiredness. Night flights, hotel rooms, the physio's table, the hours that enter no column. Having spent sixty-four nights on a night desk, I learnt that the number arrives in the morning and a whole night lies pressed underneath it. The quietest fan in the stadium is often keeping the longest ledger.

For Jansen, the real examination is not where he stands this week but how he carries both roles away from home, when the pitch offers nothing and the batting needs quick runs. If that balance holds, the double No. 1 will prove to be a beginning rather than a coincidence. If it does not, the same name will turn up somewhere else on the next sheet, and we will repeat the old mistake — reading the number, not the player.