Sachin Tendulkar Usurped By Jacques Kallis In ICC Rankings

With Sachin Tendulkar opting out of the Test series against West Indies, he has lost his top spot in the ICC’s Test match rankings for the batsmen to Jacques Kallis. According to the rules of the ICC Test match rankings, for every series that a player misses, he loses out on 1% of the points. Tendulkar was tied with Kallis at the top spot but the West Indies-series miss reduced his total.

Kallis currently has 883 points in the Test match rankings, while Tendulkar has 874. The third and the fourth spot have two players who featured against each other in the England-Sri Lanka Tests recently – Kumar Sangakkara and Jonathon Trott respectively.

Alastair Cook’s superb form in that same series against Sri Lanka, followed his bag of runs in the Ashes early this year and he is at five. Virender Sehwag, Thilan Samaraweera, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, AB de Villiers and Hashim Amla complete the top ten.

Rahul Dravid has also entered the top 20 in the rankings for the first time since November last year. He had a century and a 40 in the previous game against West Indies.

In the bowlers’ rankings, Dale Steyn continues to remain at the top while Graeme Swann is second – but more than 100 points behind him. The top nine bowlers in the ICC Test match rankings remain the same, but Chris Tremlett enters the top 10 for the first time with his excellent performance in the Sri Lanka series. He replaces Doug Bollinger at the number 10 position.

India’s Ishant Sharma also climbs up three spots to the 11th position.