Marco Jansen Tops Test Bowling and All-Rounder Charts Together, Abhishek Sharma Back at No. 1 in T20I Batting

The first thing I packed for Pune was not a pen; it was patience. Last week I watched one Marco Jansen spell three times — once on the live feed, once with the scorecard open beside me, and once on the feet-only camera where the bowler's upper body never enters the frame. All three viewings gave the same thing: the sixth-to-seventh-stump line, and a batsman's back foot arriving one frame late, ball after ball. That lateness has now become a column of points in the ICC table. Jansen stands at No. 1 among Test bowlers and No. 1 among Test all-rounders at the same time, after a match-winning spell against Australia. On the same sheet, Abhishek Sharma has returned to the top of the T20I batting list on the back of a 35-ball hundred against New Zealand. Both headlines are accurate. My interest is in the third story that got squeezed between them.

The ICC men's player rankings are a weekly ledger. They run on a rolling window: every innings adds points, older innings shed them, the order keeps moving. Test cricket has its own rhythm, and series played inside the World Test Championship carry a different weight. T20 moves fastest of all, because a match holds only 120 balls and one innings can flip the order. The ODI table is currently circling the Pakistan-England-Sri Lanka tri-series, which is nudging a handful of names up and down.

The bulletin's largest technical hole is that it carries no date. “Latest rankings” is a phrase that expires by next Wednesday. There are no points, no margins, no ranking week. A reader who wants to use this table as ammunition in an argument should first know which week's photograph he is holding. I have filed it in my notebook without a date, which is the most honest status it can have.

Marco Jansen: one name, two lists

The least-written thing about Jansen is his height — six foot nine, left arm, a release point so high that for the first three balls a batsman half-believes the ball will never bounce. Height is only the opening. The real shift is that he takes the new ball and the old ball in the eightieth over. The all-rounder list usually seats men who bowl a little and bat for their points: batsman first, bowler second. Jansen arrived in the reverse order.

That is the actual meaning of the double crown, and the least understood part of it: the all-rounder index weighs availability more heavily than skill. A man who plays all three formats accumulates points quickly and loses them quickly. The top slot certifies attendance more than it certifies capacity.

Ravindra Jadeja's four-year reign was the other face of the same scale. Jadeja's all-rounder weight was built on home-condition spin and No. 6 batting, with the bowling done on turning pitches. Jansen's weight is built on pace and away conditions. One list, two very different cricketers, and a single word printed beside both.

Dale Steyn calling Jansen the best cricketer in the world has been the most-quoted line of the week. I record it, and I record this alongside: which interview it came from, when it was said, in what context — none of that is supplied. A senior pro's admiration has its own value. Treating it as ranking evidence merges two different things.

And what never gets recorded: forty-seven days leave marks, even when the scorecard looks clean. Jansen's calendar — Tests, ODIs, T20Is, franchise cricket, airports — sits in no column of the ranking table. When a fast bowler tops two lists at once, the first question should not be how large he is. It should be how long his body carries the load.

Abhishek Sharma: the rate argument

A 35-ball hundred against New Zealand — the report also logs a 113-run innings — and a return to the top of the T20I batting list. Ishan Kishan had taken that chair in July, and Travis Head has stayed in the race. The same report says Abhishek first reached No. 1 in July 2026. A date problem surfaces here, and I am keeping it aside for verification, because two different Julys appearing in one bulletin is enough to make a reader question the whole sheet.

On the cricket itself, the return is easy to read. The T20 batting index weighs how fast runs came more than how many came, and a powerplay innings built under field restrictions carries more weight than a managed middle-overs knock. That is why the T20 list swings hardest — one series, two innings, and the order turns over. The same measure fails in Test cricket, where 35 balls has never lifted anyone to the top.

The rest of the ledger: the names outside the headline

Temba Bavuma's 179 left the series level at 1-1, and his points climbed in proportion. Harry Brook moved up for England.

Scott Boland's name arrived in this bulletin with the least noise and asks for the most attention. Ten years of Sheffield Shield, a Test place earned after thirty, and now a rise in the rankings. A late career is an archive that refuses to sit still — and the domestic matches nobody televises are its pages. Simon Harmer is the same story in another key: county arithmetic, finger spin, and now a recorded climb.

In T20Is, Sanju Samson, Finn Allen, Mitchell Santner and Arshdeep Singh moved up. In ODIs, Ben Duckett, Shaheen Afridi, Azmatullah Omarzai, Namibia's Bernard Scholtz and Afghanistan's Mohammad Nabi all gained. None of them made a headline, but for smaller nations those points shape the next selection, and sometimes the shape of a career.

What is being read is something else

Seen from outside, this becomes “double delight”, as though Jansen had won a trophy. The ranking is arithmetic over a window. If he does not play two Tests next month, the same table will drop him, and nothing in his cricket will have changed. The second error is century worship: a 35-ball hundred matters because it was made under powerplay restrictions, not because it wore the label. The third error is the costliest — accepting a bulletin with no points, no date and no independent match sourcing as a final truth. I tried to cross-check two of its claims outside the file. One held. One date did not.

What to watch next

The table will move again within weeks. The question worth carrying is whether Jansen's load survives the next World Test Championship cycle, and how long Abhishek's chair holds against a genuinely quick attack. For names like Boland, this bulletin is only a ledger; the real question is next morning's net session, which keeps no score. The rankings tell you where a man stands. They do not tell you how many mornings it took to get there — or whether he will still be standing there tomorrow.