Two Ends of the Same Page: Marco Jansen's Twin Crowns and the Rankings Column Nobody Reads

On a Wednesday morning the office printer produces two sheets. One is the Test table, one is the ODI table. I file both in the drawer where seventeen years of such Wednesdays are kept. The file is heavy now, and nobody returns to most of its pages. This time, though, one name is printed twice on the first sheet — Marco Jansen, first among Test bowlers, first among Test all-rounders. Twenty-five years old, two crowns on a single table. Every rankings table has a column nobody reads. After the name, after the team, before the points — "matches". The reader looks at the position, looks at the rating, and skips the column between them that says how many matches the position was built from. I read that column. For me the story is there. On the second sheet, in the ODI bowling list at No. 9, there is a name the Indian reader will not recognise — Bernard Scholtz, Namibia. He has the same column in front of him, and in it sits a figure no Test bowler's column can ever hold: zero. Namibia does not play Test cricket. Scholtz does not have the door that this particular lock is fitted to. Put those two names on one printout, one morning, one typeface, and every cricket headline of the week collapses into a single sentence: one man has two crowns, and the other has nowhere to put one. A ranking does not measure ability. It measures how many chances you were given and what you did with them. The two stories Marco Jansen reached this position after the Test against Australia in which his work appeared in two separate columns of the scorecard. What he did with the ball and what he did with the bat were counted together, and the result was his name at the top of both the Test bowling table and the Test all-rounder table. That is not an ordinary event. Very few cricketers have sat on both summits at once, and most of those who did had been doing both jobs for so long that the argument had run out of oxygen. The second story belongs to India. Abhishek Sharma returned to No. 1 among T20I batters on the back of 113 off 38 balls against New Zealand; his hundred came off 35. A 35-ball hundred in any format is the kind of event a broadcaster turns into a graphic within seconds, and under that graphic there is a thin line recording how many times it has happened. I did not look at the line. I looked at the 38 balls. Abhishek has been to No. 1 before. The chair moved between hands in between — Ishan Kishan sat in it for a while, Travis Head was in the conversation, and now it is Abhishek again. One small correction belongs here, because record-keeping errors travel quietly and a reader of old pages will trust them later. The dates being attached to Abhishek's first ascent and to Ishan Kishan's occupancy are both being placed in a July of the same year, which does not survive arithmetic. Test and T20I tables move weekly, and when the dates do not sit where they are put, the whole story becomes a photograph with the right frame and the wrong calendar behind it. The third piece of context is the ground under all of this: Ravindra Jadeja's reign ended. He had held No. 1 among Test all-rounders for roughly four years. Four years. In a table refreshed every week, a four-year tenure is not a coincidence — it is a continuity that has to be fed with something in every series. And it was ended by a man nine years younger who does not bowl spin the way Jadeja bowls it, and does not bat the way Jadeja bats, but who is a different kind of cricketer being weighed on the same scale. Around these, the bulletin carries names that get no headline. Temba Bavuma made 179 and the series finished 1-1. Harry Brook moved up. Scott Boland and Simon Harmer moved up. In T20Is, Sanju Samson, Finn Allen, Mitchell Santner and Arshdeep Singh shifted places. In ODIs, Ben Duckett, Shaheen Afridi, Azmatullah Omarzai, Mohammad Nabi and Bernard Scholtz were entered. Reading that list, one thing always catches at me: all of them passed through the same system in the same week on the same sheet of paper, and none of them has the door Jansen has. Two crowns and a count The simplest way to understand a rating is to treat it as a safe into which coins are dropped after every match. The number of coins is set by your performance, but the age of the coins already inside also matters — old coins lose their shine slowly. A rating is a weighted average, and the oldest enemy of any average is the same: fresh sample. Now put Jansen into that safe. He is twenty-five and does not have what Virat Kohli or Joe Root has — a long, unbroken queue of matches. South Africa does not play as many Tests a year as India, England or Australia. Their calendar has series that arrive, end, and leave months of nothing in between. In that nothing, the rating does not move. And when you play fewer matches, every match presses harder on the average. One good Test can lift you; one bad Test can drop you faster than it lifted you. This is where the least-written fact of the week hides. A double No. 1 is an achievement, but it is a particular kind of achievement — one built on a small sample. For a cricketer who plays fourteen Tests a year, reaching No. 1 is as hard as staying there. For a cricketer who plays seven, reaching is easier and staying is harder, because he has fewer chances to correct and a fall waiting in every match. I am not saying Jansen's crown was not earned. I am saying the arithmetic that made it does not sit in his hands. It sits in the hands of a board that commits to future tours. Take the second table — the all-rounders'. It is the strangest table in cricket, because it is a safe in which rupees and dollars are dropped together with no exchange rate posted anywhere. A run and a wicket go into the same vessel. No law of cricket says how many runs a wicket is worth, and the formula does not say either. It measures the two separately, adds them, and we print the sum under the word "best all-rounder". Where Jansen bats, scoring runs is a different job. A man at seven or eight gets three things: fewer balls, a scattered field, and a freedom the top order never gets — he is not afraid of losing, because he is already standing at the edge of a loss. When it comes off, the runs arrive fast and are counted fast; when it does not, a short innings leaves a small mark on an average. It is a position where both the risk and the reward run steep. Jadeja did that job for four years in a different setting. He did it on home soil, at five or six, on pitches that turned, batting the way men batted in the eighties, while also bowling the longest spells of the innings. In those four years there were tours when selectors picked him and tours when they did not — the ranking did not flinch, because a ranking does not watch selection. It only watches what you did when you played. A cricketer outside the XI neither rises nor falls; he simply stays where he is, like a figure in an old photograph. That is why Jadeja's four years and Jansen's week cannot be placed on one line, even though the table places them there. One was continuity; the other is a rise of a few weeks. Both are correct in their own place. But when we read "No. 1 all-rounder", we fold both into one phrase, and the phrase erases the distance between them. Abhishek's 38 balls and the table's short memory The defining quality of the T20I table is that its memory is short. That comes from the format's nature: where every match lasts three hours, nobody needs to remember old ones. The consequence is that No. 1 in T20Is is not a post, it is a stopover. A few good weeks lift you; a few empty weeks drop you. Add another layer. India plays more T20 internationals than any other board. In a table where the sample is small and one country's players generate most of the sample, the summit will keep rotating among that country's players. This is not a conspiracy; it is arithmetic. Whoever gets weighed most often leaves the most marks on the scale. Now look at those 38 balls. Abhishek reached a hundred in 35. In the last three he added thirteen more. That small figure says a great deal. An innings that climbed fast and then flattened — because the overs ran out, or the bowlers changed, or a partner was at the other end. For whatever reason, the slope met a plateau. Making 113 off 38 creates a sense in the watcher that this man could have made more, and that sense is what makes it memorable. The ranking does not measure the sense. It counts runs and balls, and there were a lot of runs. Over the years I have watched a big innings produce a jump in the table and then a story grow around the jump — the story that this player is now complete. The innings was an event, and the jump was its entry in a ledger. They should not be treated as one thing. Abhishek is, right now, among India's most useful T20 weapons; I say that from matches I have watched rather than from a table. But his being No. 1 is not proof that he is the best T20 batter in the world. It is proof that he scored the most in the last few weeks. That is a smaller, more honest sentence. The queue, and the queue inside the queue In seventeen years of rankings reporting, one thing has kept repeating: the names at the bottom of the table are more interesting than the names at the top. Look at Simon Harmer. Thirty-six, South African, and his best cricket was played in English county cricket — for Essex, year after year, in a competition where the matches outnumber internationals several times over and where nobody is filming. When he came home he got a Test cap, and now his rating is climbing. At thirty-six. This is a story no headline will carry, because it has no hundred, no record and no controversy. It has only this: a man bowled for a decade in a place nobody watched, and when somebody watched, he was good. Look at Scott Boland. He is the fourth seamer in a team whose first three seamers are the three best seamers in the world. Read his record and he looks like he would open the bowling for any other Test side. In Australia he is fourth. That is a queue inside a queue — and it is precisely where a ranking misleads, because a ranking never tells you how often you will be picked. Look at Bernard Scholtz. A Namibian spinner, top ten in the world in ODI bowling. He plays for a country without Test status, which means his name will never appear in the table where Jansen's appeared twice on a Wednesday morning. The skill is the same — turn, line, the removal of a batter's comfort. He simply does not have the paper. Look at Mohammad Nabi. Afghanistan's longest-serving cricketer, still in the ODI all-rounder list. A player from the country with the shortest international calendar is holding a place in a table populated by players from the countries with the longest. It is a picture that invites you to conclude that a ranking does not discriminate. That is its deepest illusion. A ranking does not discriminate; it simply counts only those it gets the chance to count. And Bavuma. A captain of a side whose batting framework has been thin for years made 179, and the series finished level at 1-1. It is a major innings and it should be called one. But if you read that innings as evidence that South Africa's batting problem is solved, you are laying one match's arithmetic over a decade's structure. Bavuma did his job. The structure is where it was. The ranking will lift him. The structure will stay. What the double crown does not show Let me say that the most attractive sentence in this whole story is not in any figure but in a line attributed to Dale Steyn — that Jansen is the best cricketer in the world right now. It is the opinion of a great fast bowler, and the opinion of great fast bowlers should not be taken lightly, because they recognise the work they used to do. But I want to weigh that sentence last, because it is the sentence that arrives before the data and gives the data a direction. Once you have read "best cricketer in the world", every number after it will appear to confirm it. That is the oldest tool in sports journalism and also its largest trap. Three things are invisible inside a double crown. The first is condition. Jansen's crown came after a Test against Australia, and Tests against Australia are generally played on pitches where a fast bowler gets bounce and air both. A six-foot-eight left-armer releasing from that height is a different organism in those conditions. The same man in Rajkot in March, or in Colombo humidity, is a different organism. A ranking does not record condition. It records outcome. The second is batting position. The all-rounder table never says where you bat. Runs at seven and runs at four go into one safe, though their value is different — one is played to save an innings, the other to attack one. Until the table states that difference, it is handing us half the information and asking for a full verdict. The third is sample. I will not add a number here, because inventing a number I do not know is the easiest and dirtiest thing in my trade. I will only say that if you read the "matches" column next to every name, you will find a picture in which some of the people at the top have fewer matches than some of the people below them. That does not make the ranking false. It makes it a tool rather than a medal. One more thing belongs in the record, because it is the blind spot in our collective memory. This week we will remember "double No. 1". We will not remember that the same week placed a Namibian spinner in the ODI top ten who has no Test to be ranked in. Ten years from now, anyone looking at this year's table will find Jansen's record and Scholtz's name — and will not find the note that the difference between them was not a cricketing difference but a paper one. That is where a reporter's work begins: writing the note, so that the record does not lie on its own. Next Wednesday, next calendar I know that next Wednesday the printer will produce two sheets again, and some names on them will have changed places. That is the nature of a ranking — not a photograph but a series, and every frame in a series differs slightly from the one before. What will not change next Wednesday is the structure that made this Wednesday. South Africa will not play as many Tests in the next World Test Championship cycle as India or England, and their players' ratings will rise and fall in that proportion. Namibia will not play Tests in the next cycle either. Bernard Scholtz will not be in the table Jansen is in next year, whether or not they bowl the same kind of ball. So when I put this Wednesday's story into the file, I put a small slip in with it, carrying a question in my handwriting: if a ranking does not measure what we think it measures, why do we print it so solemnly every week? Perhaps because it is the only table that reminds us weekly that nothing in cricket is permanent. And perhaps because the day we decide the doors are equal is the day we stop writing about the people who do not have one. The printer goes quiet. The drawer closes. The count for next Wednesday has already begun.