A Ranking Is an Index, Not a Ledger: The Arithmetic Behind Jansen's Two Crowns and Abhishek's No. 1

The ICC rankings page refreshed after the third day of the third Test, and two lines landed on the same screen. The first: Marco Jansen — 10 wickets in two Tests, 5/33 in one innings, 85 runs from No. 8, and top spot in both the Test bowling and Test allrounder tables. The second: Abhishek Sharma — 113 off 38 balls, and a return to the No. 1 T20I batting chair. One afternoon, two formats, two different stories, and the same two words typed in front of both.

In that Jayanagar flat through 2026, hand-coding 12,600 IPL deliveries, one thing surfaced slowly: A quiet flat in Jayanagar was my first trading floor. I still read a rankings table in that order — inputs first, outputs second, headline last.

A rankings brief has a simple job: who did what, and where it landed them. The coverage this time is wide — Test, ODI and T20I; South Africa, India, England, Australia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and New Zealand. Temba Bavuma's 179, Harry Brook's climb, Scott Boland and Simon Harmer moving up, Shaheen Shah Afridi and Azmatullah Omarzai entering, and a bowling list churning around Mitchell Starc, Matt Henry, Ollie Robinson, Jasprit Bumrah and Ravindra Jadeja.

The real weight of this coverage is that it puts three different scales on one page. Each format carries separate batting, bowling and allrounder tables, and each is computed differently. A rating is built on a rolling window, weights recent innings more heavily, adjusts for opposition strength and enforces a minimum number of matches. The full weighting formula is not public — from outside you see the output, not the weighting machinery. That is the least-written and most necessary sentence in the whole brief.

Read Jansen's two chairs off the table and they look like two achievements. Read them off the arithmetic and they are two outputs of one event. The allrounder rating is not an independent measure; it is derived from the batting and bowling ratings. Ten wickets in two Tests and a 5/33 spell pushed the bowling rating up sharply; 85 from No. 8 lifted the batting component; the two combining carried the allrounder table to the top by itself. The allrounder crown is not a third win — it is a second print of the first. The distinction looks small, and it is exactly the distinction that separates "two crowns" from "one excellent series" in a reader's head.

One more thing belongs here, because Jansen's series cannot be understood without it. Eighty-five from No. 8 is not just runs — it is a situation, an innings in which the top order had folded and the lower order had to keep the game alive. The value of such an innings shows up not in the run count but in its share of the team total. How much the rating system weighs that share is not disclosed. Treating the 85 as the direct cause of "allrounder No. 1" is the same error repeated in every match report.

Turn to Abhishek. A hundred and thirteen off 38 balls is a genuine outlier; in T20 the strike-rate component sits directly inside the rating, and an innings like that can move a chair in one evening. The two innings before it were 29 and 27. Three innings is not a trend, it is a spike. The T20I batting table is the fastest-moving table in the sport, and the fastest-moving table is also the least trustworthy. I once sat with a twelve-ball spell for three weeks before admitting it was noise; declaring a "return" off three innings is convenient journalism, not measurement.

The brief mentions Ishan Kishan's injury, and it mentions it in the right place but for the wrong reason. Kishan's absence gave Abhishek the opportunity; it did not lift Abhishek's rating. A rating moves only on a player's own innings. Collapsing opportunity and cause into one sentence is the habit that produced a thousand "form arrived the moment he got a chance" stories. In my ledger, opportunity is a condition, not a cause.

The third thing that grates is format-jumping. "No. 1" gets written and the format gets left in brackets. A Test No. 1 bowling rating and a T20I No. 1 batting rating share no common scale — they are kilometres and hours. A reader who sees both on one page quietly forms the question "who is really on top in cricket today", and this table does not answer it.

And the fourth, which the brief admits, perhaps without noticing: it states that the top two Test bowling spots could change quickly. That is the most honest sentence in the piece. A crown that can change hands in one innings is not a crown; it is a rate. What is being called a crown is a smoothed rate floating on a rolling window. Calling it a crown makes the story read better and the mechanism read worse.

This is where my trade applies. I read rankings the way I read prices, and I measure their velocity the same way. A ranking is a slow index; a market price is a fast one. 2 April 2026, Wankhede, India 31/2, my live model holding India at 62 per cent while the exchange implied 45. For ninety minutes in 2026, the price was wrong and the stadium knew it. Nobody's ranking helped that night; the batting-depth-after-wicket-two variable did, the moment Dhoni walked in at No. 5. A ranking tells you how good a player has been over months. It does not tell you the next ball.

So my first objection: the brief reports velocity, not mechanism. The reader never learns how many points Jansen's bowling rating gained, how far clear of No. 2 he is, or how thin Abhishek's lead is. If Abhishek leads No. 2 by three points, "return" is a week's guest. If Jansen leads No. 2 by forty, four wickets in the ongoing Test will not move him. Not the rank — the gap to No. 2 is the number that decides next week's story, and it is the number most absent here.

My second objection is cause versus correlation. Performance and ranking look directly linked; they are not. Opposition strength, match result, pitch behaviour and a minimum-match threshold all sit inside the number. Five wickets against a weak side and five against a strong one do not carry the same points. The brief does not say so, and therefore implies that a ranking is a direct reward for performance. It is not a reward; it is a weighted average.

I will also register what would change my mind. Publish the principal multipliers of the ICC weighting formula, and show that ranking movement comes from match-situation leverage rather than raw volume, and I will treat this table as a tool rather than decoration. Until then it is a proprietary index we are reading as an audited ledger. They don't shout. They repeat themselves until you have no excuse left. The rankings repeat weekly; the question is how we listen.

Three things are worth watching over the next few days. First, Jansen's allrounder slot in the ongoing Test — if it is a low-wicket match and he adds nothing with the bat, we will see how fast a derived table moves. Second, Abhishek's next real examination, against a stronger attack where the 38-ball space will not exist. Third, the top of the Test bowling list, which the brief itself says can change quickly — meaning the gap there is thin. Whichever moves first will tell us whether this table measures performance or headlines.

And one last absence, the largest in the whole roundup: the women's rankings. The ICC tables update for men and women on the same day, and every roundup leaves half the table out. I read that as a coverage habit rather than intent — but habits do the same damage. The day these pages print the full table, the phrase "No. 1" will finally carry its full weight.