The ICC T20I batting rankings updated on Wednesday March 11 and the biggest move belongs to Ishan Kishan. The India opener has climbed two places to reach a career-high in the world, overtaking Pakistan's Sahibzada Farhan in the process. Ishan Kishan's 54 off 25 balls in the T20 World Cup final against New Zealand was the knock that made the difference and the rankings have reflected it in the first update since the tournament ended in Ahmedabad on March 8. Farhan broke records all tournament. Kishan waited for the final and did it in 25 balls.
Ishan Kishan did in the knockout stages what Sahibzada Farhan could not
Sahibzada Farhan had a tournament that nobody in Pakistan cricket will forget quickly. He broke Virat Kohli's record for the most runs in a single T20 World Cup edition, finished with 383 runs and hit two centuries before Pakistan's campaign ended in the Super 8s. When the knockout stages began Farhan was watching from home with the No. 2 ranking in his pocket and every reason to believe it was safe. Then Ishan Kishan kept batting.
Ishan Kishan finished the tournament with 317 runs, fewer than Farhan in total, but the knockout stages are where ratings move fastest and Ishan Kishan was there for all of them. His performances in the semi-final and final carried the most weight in the calculation and his 54 off 25 against New Zealand in the final was the knock that closed the gap completely. He now sits at second position with 870 rating points, just four behind his opening partner Abhishek Sharma who retains the No. 1 spot at 874. Four rating points separate the top two T20I batters in the world. Both of them are Indian. Both of them open the batting together for the same team.
Farhan drops one place to No. 3 at 848 points. Phil Salt of England is fourth at 792 and Pathum Nissanka of Sri Lanka holds fifth at 766.
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First and second in the world and both of them open for India
The top two T20I batters in the world play for the same country and bat together at the top of the order. That is not a sentence Indian cricket gets to use often and it reflects exactly what Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan have built over the last twelve months. Not since the peak years of Kohli and Rohit has an Indian opening combination looked this dominant on the global rankings and those two were not usually first and second at the same time.
For Pakistan the timing stings. Farhan had earned his way to No. 2 with one of the great individual tournament performances in T20 World Cup history. He was preparing to make his ODI debut in Bangladesh as the second-best T20 batter in the world. He now walks into that series one place lower, overtaken by a player who scored 66 fewer runs in the same tournament but was still on the field when the trophy was being decided. Rankings do not always feel fair and this one will not feel fair to Farhan or to Pakistan.
The rest of the top ten tells its own story. Tim Seifert moves up four places to No. 6 after his knock in the final showed exactly why KKR paid what they did for him at the auction. Jacob Bethell is the biggest mover in the rankings jumping 17 places to a career-best No. 16 after a breakout tournament that announced him as one of England's most exciting white ball players. Suryakumar Yadav drops to No. 9 after a quiet tournament by his own standards. That means India have three batters in the top ten, Abhishek at one, Kishan at two and SKY at nine. No other nation is close to that right now.
