Abhishek Sharma Is the New No. 1 T20I Batter, but Marco Jansen Is the Real Story

On Wednesday night at Wellington's Sky Stadium, when Abhishek Sharma struck 113 off 38 balls, the scoreboard registered a number that made me mute my television. A strike rate of roughly 297. I checked my old notebook — since 2026 I write three things after every big innings: the seam of one ball, the sound of one spectator, and one number. That night the number was 297, and on the seam there was not the ball but the wind. Wellington's wind, which turns this ground into a batters' fair every year.

Abhishek is now the world's No. 1 T20I batter with 897 rating points. Behind him are Pakistan's Sahibzada Farhan on 883 and Ishan Kishan on 866 in third. The total gap between the three is 31 points. That is the kind of gap one good innings can overturn entirely. India won the match by six wickets; it was the third of a five-match series; and Ishan Kishan missed the second and third T20Is through injury. This is where my real argument begins.

A ranking is a weighted average. It is a mathematical memory of past performances, not a mirror of form. If a player does not play, his points do not fall — they stay frozen. Kishan's 866 were most plausibly the same points he held in July, when he was No. 1. He dropped to third because Abhishek and Farhan added points above him. But the way the story has been written — "missed the second and third T20Is through injury and slipped to third" — implies a penalty for not playing. The ranking methodology imposes no such penalty. Readers need to understand this difference, because so much of cricket's biggest debate rests on the confusion that a ranking is form.

Understanding Abhishek's innings requires one technical point. Thirty-eight balls means the 36 balls of the powerplay plus two balls of the seventh over. His innings was built almost entirely in the phase when only two fielders were outside the circle. That is a distinct skill. A sixty-ball hundred built against a spread field in the middle overs and a thirty-eight-ball hundred inside the powerplay should not be put in the same bag — that is the most common analytical error. The first is an exploitation of fielding restrictions; the second is control of the ball. Abhishek did the first, beautifully, but it does not say about his career what four T20I centuries say.

The four centuries are the durable evidence; the 38-ball hundred is the volatile evidence. Scoring hundreds across multiple series and conditions in one season is a genuine skill marker. One innings at a strike rate of 297 is a tail event — it shows how high his ceiling is, not that his average will stay there. If someone says tomorrow that Abhishek is a 300-strike-rate batter, they will be falling for exactly this illusion.

Now the part that got the least space in this story but deserved the most. Marco Jansen has become simultaneously the No. 1 Test bowler and the No. 1 Test all-rounder. A left-arm fast bowler who also scores Test runs occupies one of cricket's thinnest categories. The bowling table rewards specialists; the all-rounder table demands dual output. Topping both at once is rare, and it is the biggest achievement of this night. Alongside it, Ravindra Jadeja has lost the No. 1 Test all-rounder spot after more than four years. That is the marker of the end of an era, compressed into one line of a ranking table.

Jasprit Bumrah has slipped to fifth on 853 points. Do not read that as decline. 853 points at fifth tells you how compressed the top of the Test bowling table is. A one-place move is noise. For a bowler on a managed workload, ranking movement is a fixture-count artefact at least as much as a form signal. And Shreyas Iyer — India's T20I captain — is ninth on 758, 139 points off the top. That is the quiet contradiction the story smoothed over. Captaincy status and batting ranking are two different things, and putting them in one sentence misleads the reader.

In women's cricket, Laura Wolvaardt overtook Smriti Mandhana to take the No. 1 ODI spot, while Shafali Verma is third and Mandhana fourth in T20Is. That is good news, but it should be read with the same care — the four format tables are entirely separate, and placing them together in one story trains readers to treat "No. 1" as a single global status.

I return to the Wellington wind. At a ground where the wind is so strong and shifting that a bowler cannot hold his line, a batter's licence grows. This does not diminish Abhishek's innings, but it is worth remembering how repeatable the performance is. Have we ever seen Abhishek in an innings where the ball is moving, where three wickets are down for 40, and he must bat at a strike rate of 120? That page is not yet in his file. And until that page is filled, the No. 1 chair is a photograph, not a residence.

For me the biggest lesson of this night is that a No. 1 ranking built on a 31-point gap is not a status but a moment. Abhishek, Farhan and Kishan — the difference between all three can change in a single innings. A reader who takes "world No. 1" as a permanent title will have over-read the data. A reader who takes it as a photograph from Wednesday is in the right place.

If Abhishek is out for 20 next series and Farhan makes 70, the table will change again. The question is not who is No. 1. The question is whether our cricket journalism will write that change with as much seriousness as it wrote this rise. I had muted the television, and in that silence one thing was clear — rankings keep changing, but the wind of that innings will not be recorded in any table.