The Chair Keeps Spinning: Starc's No.1, Jansen's Buried Story, and the Frame-by-Frame Truth of the ICC Rankings

The Chair Keeps Spinning: Starc's No.1, Jansen's Buried Story, and the Frame-by-Frame Truth of the ICC Rankings

Hook

Day four at Newlands. The patch on the pitch had dried to a different colour from everything around it. The off-spinner is landing the ball on that patch, the slip cordon has crept two steps closer, and the man at cover knows his job this innings is mostly decorative. I ran that over at quarter speed three times — pause the frame, the game tells you everything twice. Then I opened a second window on the second monitor: a left-arm quick's nine-wicket match, thousands of kilometres away. Six second-innings wickets for the spinner, nine for the pace bowler across a whole Test. Both names climbing the same table in the same week — the ICC Test rankings.

The headline that went out said: pacer back at No.1. I stopped there. When the top three names in a table have changed hands at least three times in a few months, 'back' is not a story about achievement. It is a story about a chair that keeps spinning. And when a chair turns that easily, the real question is not who is sitting in it. The real question is why it is so light.

Context — A Ranking Is a Formula, Not an Average

This ICC release is a rankings round-up: Test, ODI and T20I, three separate tables in one press note. It carries data from the Australia–South Africa Test series in a World Test Championship context, a Pakistan-hosted ODI tri-series, India's tour of New Zealand, Afghanistan against Zimbabwe in the UAE, and West Indies' Test in Mirpur.

Start with the thing that should preface every rankings release and almost never does. The ICC ranking is not an average; it is a formula. Opponent strength is weighted, recency is weighted, and the volume of runs and wickets is counted. What is not counted is which innings the wicket fell in, what the pitch was doing, who was batting at the other end, or whether the series was already decided. The table gives you a number, and the number arrives without its context. Once you accept that, you have to read the release's three sections separately, because all three share one condition — sample size.

Core — The Mechanism, Not the Number

The way the No.1 Test bowling chair is moving is itself the biggest data point in the release. Jasprit Bumrah to Mitchell Starc, Starc to Marco Jansen, Jansen back to Starc — all inside a window shorter than a year. The ICC's own release notes Starc first took the crown in August by ending Bumrah's reign. When the top spot changes hands that fast, only one reading survives: the top of the table is so tightly bunched that a single good or bad match reorders it. Starc's return to No.1 is a micro-event — in the match where he took nine, Jansen took three. That is a nine-versus-three gap, not a career gap.

One disclosure belongs here, because I keep a public ledger of my misses. A few specifics in this release I could not fully reconcile against my own clip library and the available records — how a player is described in a leadership role, what a series result actually was, which arm a bowler uses. In one or two places the prose and the numbers contradict each other. So everything that follows is about the patterns and mechanics of the rankings, not about any single figure being the last word. The patterns hold. A name or two is still pending verification.

Now Jansen. The headline says he fell from No.1. The table says something else. He lost the bowling chair and extended his No.1 all-rounder position to a career-best rating in the same week. That is the contradiction no headline catches. Three wickets is a cold match by his standards, but a half-century in the same Test fills in the other half of the ledger. Test cricket produces pure No.1 bowlers routinely; a No.1 all-rounder who also sits second on the bowling table is far rarer. In team-balance terms he is an engine — a man who can take the ball in the twelfth over and bat at seven. That engine did not slow down this week. It moved to a different table.

Then Simon Harmer's leap. Six wickets in the second innings, Player of the Match, up nine places to seventh, one spot ahead of Kagiso Rabada. This is where the formula shows its hardest limit. An off-spinner's six-for on a dry fourth-innings surface and a fast bowler's four-for on a flat deck can look identical in a table. They are never equal in cricket. Harmer's rise is real, and it is condition-born. Watching the ball grip and turn off that patch on day four, any competent off-spinner could have owned that week's numbers — the only requirement was landing it on the right length. I stopped watching the ball the year I started watching the feet, and here the feet say Harmer's seventh place is the pitch's product more than his own.

South Africa is the release's biggest structural winner, and it is entirely absent from the headline. Three Test batting risers — Markram, Mulder, and Rickelton, whose jump is twenty-five places. Two bowlers inside the top ten, Harmer and Rabada. Jansen at No.1 among all-rounders. That is a four-pillar team portrait, not a one-man show. When players from one Test side climb four separate tables at once, that is news about structure rather than form — provided the sample is large. Here it is not, and I am flagging that caveat myself, because a home-heavy scheduling block can produce the same picture.

Pakistan's ODI surge — Shaheen, Rauf, Fakhar — is largely a hosting and volume effect. Tri-series cricket against mixed-quality opposition piles up ranking points. The formula does not ask who was standing at the other end; it only asks how much you did. That is why collective post-series jumps are routine, and why they get misread as form reversals.

And then the New Zealand data, the most interesting piece in the round-up. India won that series, but the names climbing the rankings are New Zealand's. That is direct evidence these tables measure individual volume, not team results. A player on the losing side can rise because he did his job. The same logic explains the West Indies names moving after the Mirpur win — on a slow, low surface, spinners taking wickets in bulk was close to preordained. And Azmatullah Omarzai reaching No.3 among T20I all-rounders says Afghanistan's pathway is now producing all-rounders, not only bowlers.

This release has a second market, in India and Pakistan, and there it will be read against its own headline. Shreyas Iyer's climb in the T20I table in India; the Shaheen-Rauf pairing in Pakistan. The real story is that one press note generates three separate national narratives. That is not a flaw. That is what these tables are actually for.

Contrarian — What the Headline Will Not Say

The framing of this round-up is off in two places, and both errors lean the same way.

First: the praise for Starc is larger than the evidence supports. Nine wickets in one match lifted him, and that is true. But 'best Test bowler in the world' does not follow from this table, because the same table is telling you three men are taking turns in that chair. When a position changes hands inside one match, it is a snapshot, not a certificate of superiority.

Second: Jansen's story has been buried. The headline says he dropped. He lost one chair and set a career-high in another. This is not the first time the all-rounder table has been orphaned in reporting. Media wants one clean number — No.1 — and the all-rounder's No.1 deserves the same banner yet gets flattened by the bowling No.1 every time.

One more point, because this is a data-integrity matter: the release is internally inconsistent on the series result. In one place a spinner's spell is credited with winning a series; in another, the distribution of wickets points the other way. Both cannot be true. Until a secondary source confirms it, I am filing the series winner under pending verification — and remembering that if Starc's nine wickets came in a dead rubber, they are worth less than the headline claims. My 2026 IPL auction model mispriced nearly every wrist spinner on the board, and since then I print a standing paragraph with every model stating what it cannot see. This ranking table is also a model. Its blind spots are innings, pitch, and stakes.

Takeaway

Three things I will watch next series, and all three are about mechanism rather than names. One: does the chair flip again. Two: does Jansen hold top-two among all-rounders. Three: where Harmer's seventh place settles on the next flat deck. For now the ranking has done its job — it handed you a number. The question is whether you treat that number as a verdict or as a snapshot.