Abhishek Back at 897, Jansen Holds Both Test Crowns: What the ICC Rankings Counted, and What They Left Out

38 Balls, 113 Runs, and a Crown Delivered by the Calendar

On Monday evening Abhishek Sharma made 113 off 38 balls against New Zealand. On Wednesday morning the ICC rankings release landed and he was back at No.1 among T20I batters with 897 rating points. Ishan Kishan slipped two rungs to third, 31 points off the top. Sahibzada Farhan sits second on 883, just 14 behind Abhishek. In the same release, South Africa's Marco Jansen took No.1 in both Test bowling and Test all-rounder standings — 876 points, a five-place jump — ending Ravindra Jadeja's reign of more than four years.

The information is clean. The release is clean. And nobody is a more authoritative source on ICC rankings than the ICC. My objection is not to the numbers; it is to the frame we pack them in. Every time a batter "returns" to No.1, a television graphic is born, and that graphic takes the place of the session in which the innings was actually played. The ranking gave Abhishek the crown; it did not tell you that a 38-ball innings is an event, not a system.

The real story, to my mind, is not the ranking. It is India's opening queue. One seat, three names, and 31 points between them. That gap is small enough to flip in an evening — which is why this is a selection story wearing a ranking story's clothes.

A Ranking Is a Product, and Should Be Read Like One

Over the years I have read ranking releases on deadline often enough to know one thing holds every time: ICC rankings are not a measure of form, they are a recency-weighted average of usefulness. Recent matches carry more weight, older ones decay, and for players near the top the average becomes so stable that only something extraordinary moves it. 113 off 38 is exactly that extraordinary thing. White-ball batting ratings weigh rate alongside volume, so an innings where runs and strike rate both peak produces a jump out of proportion to anything else on the card.

The arithmetic is not wrong. It is incomplete. The rating system does not know whether the team won, what the pitch was like, who was bowling, or what the innings was for. It is an account, and an account only records what is entered into it.

The language of the release belongs to that market too — double delight, making waves, plenty of other big movers. That is promotional register, and there is nothing dishonest about it, because rankings are the ICC's product and products need a market. My argument is that the reader deserves both the product and the fine print. A No.1 tag is useful currency — at the contract table, in advertising, in selection debates. That is why it is news. It is not a selection decision, and we keep presenting it as one.

Context matters. India are in the middle of a five-match T20I series against New Zealand, and Abhishek's innings belongs to it. South Africa's Test series is live, and Jansen's numbers are spread across two Tests — 26 and 35 in Durban, 85 in Gqeberha; 3/68 and 1/45 in the first Test, 5/33 and 1/34 in the second. That is a story of a season, not an era. The ranking puts both into one ledger, and that is where the reader starts getting shortchanged.

I am repeating an old habit here, and I am labelling it memory rather than evidence: after Eden Gardens in March 2026 I wrote my first column arguing that the miracle was arithmetic. Forty angry emails arrived by Friday. The habit has stayed — the scorecard lied; the session rate told the truth. Today the habit says 897 is a scorecard, and the session rate is what the next four innings show.

The Economics of 113: A Superb Ceiling, a Floor Still Unproven

113 off 38 balls is a strike rate of roughly 297. That is rare in T20 cricket, and it carries outsized weight in a rating that reads volume and velocity in the same ledger. When you are near the top, where every player's average is stable, an innings like that can shove you 14 to 30 points forward. That is what happened. Farhan on 883, Abhishek on 897 — a 14-point gap, the gap of one good innings.

The question is what that innings does for India. An opener's job in T20 splits in two: set the rate in the powerplay, then hold it from overs seven to fifteen, when the ball is older and the field is spread. 113 off 38 means someone else played the bulk of the innings. That is not a criticism; it is a role, and the role is called impact, not anchor. Based on my years of watching matches, the openers who win series are the ones whose worst score is around 25 and best around 90 — because series are decided by averages, not by peaks.

The reverse is just as true and I will not hide it. The ceiling has become more valuable in modern T20. Teams that cross 200 often do it on the strength of the one innings I am calling an event. India's batting depth is deep enough that Abhishek does not have to worry much about the floor — that is his advantage, and it is invisible in a ranking. Rankings like ceilings. Teams need ceilings and floors. The difference never appears on a list.

One more thing. A large share of that innings came in the powerplay, where the field is forced back and the ball is hard. Powerplay rate and middle-overs rate are different skills. The ranking merges them into one number. Next time a graphic appears, ask how many of those runs came in the first six overs and how many after. The answer usually rewrites the story.

The 31-Point Queue: Three Openers, One Seat, One Unsourced Injury

897, 883, and Kishan at roughly 866 — 31 points across three men. Cricket calls that competition; a selection panel calls it a headache. India have three openers occupying the top three ranking spots at once, and none of them owns the seat. It is a good problem, but it is a problem.

Kishan's case makes the queue more interesting. According to the release he took No.1 from Abhishek in July and is now third. The reason given for the slide is an injury, but no source is attached — no team bulletin, no board statement, no medical update. This is my standing complaint. The ranking is cited in every sentence; the injury in none. A fact without a source is not a fact; it is a rumour written in good grammar.

There is a dating snag here that readers will skip and editors cannot. The report says in one place that Abhishek first reached No.1 in July 2026, and in another that Kishan took the spot from him in July this year. If the report is from 2026, both sentences describe the same July and cancel each other out. It looks small. But in cricket journalism a date does the work an accounting entry date does — nothing is valid without it. I chase the story, then make it show its receipts. Here the receipt is incomplete.

Shreyas Iyer's name also appears among the big movers. He is a middle-order batter, so this is a separate argument from the opening debate, but the message is clear: Indian batting depth is deep enough that its effect shows on several floors of the ranking at once. That is good news, and it is also what makes selection hard. A team with four options does not have one settled pair.

There is a conclusion here I find uncomfortable, and I am writing it because discomfort is this column's fuel. International cricket's greatest asset is continuity; India's greatest asset is a crowd of alternatives. The ranking rewards the crowd, selection tries to resolve it, and between them gets crushed the one pair that needs to play ten straight games in a World Cup. A 31-point gap in a queue is thrilling. The absence of a settled pair in that queue is expensive.

Jansen's Double Entry, and Jadeja's Calendar

Marco Jansen's story is the second headline of this release, and I think it is the more solid one — because it has both bowling and batting numbers from the same series. 876 points, a five-place jump, top of the Test bowling table. Also No.1 among Test all-rounders.

I have always treated the all-rounder rating as an accounting problem, because it runs on double entry — batting points and bowling points in one ledger. When a player sits near the top twenty in both departments, his all-rounder score climbs faster than anyone else's. Jansen's Gqeberha match is the cleanest example: 85 runs and 5/33 in the same game. Two large deposits in one afternoon.

But the real story is not the one Jansen won. It is the one Jadeja lost, and that story is about a calendar, not about performance. Staying top of the Test all-rounder table for more than four years needs two things — continuous matches and continuous contribution in both departments. Jadeja's career is now in the phase where Indian workload management does not pick him for every series, and the white-ball priority thins his Test calendar further. I am not making an accusation; this is a structural reading. A rating needs matches to survive, and matches are now decided by board calendars, not by a player's appetite.

My old argument applies again. The board beat is the cricket beat. When you look at selection, rest and scheduling, you are looking at financial decisions wearing cricket clothes. Jadeja losing the crown is one such decision — his Test average did not fall, his match count changed. The ranking sees the count, and a count never lies; it just reports what was entered.

The top five of Test bowling is worth reading too — Jansen, then Mitchell Starc, Matt Henry, Ollie Robinson and Jasprit Bumrah. Bumrah's presence is both relief and worry for India, because he wrestles with the same calendar problem Jadeja does. A bowler who plays six Tests a year climbs slowly no matter how good his average is. That is not a flaw in the system; it is the system's nature, and we should read it as nature, not as a verdict.

Temba Bavuma's case is the other side of the same logic. A Player of the Match performance lifted him four places to No.2 among Test batters. Travis Head is up there too. The South Africa–Australia series is the kind of Test cricket I have watched for thirty years — slow, heavy, and leaving its clearest signals in exactly that texture. Jansen's 85 is the series' biggest story because it shows how the lower order turns a match, and the ranking catches that turn first, since it holds both ledgers at once.

Where I Could Be Wrong

First, and most importantly: I am asking a ranking to do something it never claimed to do. It is an index, not a selection policy. If the captain and coach sit down on Sunday and decide to play Abhishek and Kishan together, the whole ranking debate becomes irrelevant in one afternoon. My criticism is aimed not at the ranking but at the coverage that presents it as team selection.

Second, on Jansen my objection may not survive. If he takes wickets at under 25 again next series, this will prove to be an era, not a season, and I will have to write that. There is also a structural point in his favour — fast bowlers' numbers always look better at home. If most of his work in the next two years comes in the subcontinent, those 876 points will belong to a different story.

Third, and this may be my biggest miss. I am calling 113 an event. If Abhishek scores 40-odd at a strike rate above 150 in each of the next three matches and India win the series, my event-versus-system argument weakens — because three innings together will have built the system I refused to see in one. And if Kishan returns fit and takes No.1 straight back, this entire piece expires within a week. That is the occupational risk of rankings journalism, and I accept it.

Next Time, the Graphic or the Average?

My prediction comes in three testable parts. First, the gap among the top three will stay under 40 points at the next rankings update — a 31-point queue is a queue that flips in one innings. Second, Jansen will remain in the top three of Test bowling over the next twelve months, but the all-rounder crown will change hands at least once in that window, because a double-entry ledger shakes fastest. Third, and most checkable of all: the next time Abhishek makes headlines, the question will be what his average was across his next four innings, not what his highest score was.

A ranking tells you where you stand. It does not tell you where you are going. 897 points is an address, not a speed. And in cricket, especially in the T20 series running right now, direction matters more than the address. The next time a No.1 flashes on screen, pause for a second and ask: at what rate will this man bat in his next innings? The ranking will not answer. The scorecard will — and only once we stop reading it and start counting.