India captain Rohit Sharna, wicketkeeper batter Rishabh Pant and former captain Virat Kohli slipped a place each in the ICC Test Rankings for Batters, updated on Wednesday, March 30. While Rohit went from No. 7 to No. 8, Kohli has done just enough to keep himself in the top 10 in the longest format of the game.
Both Rohit and Kohli had ordinary outings in the 2-Test series against Sri Lanka earlier this month. While the skipper managed 90 from 2 Tests, Kohli picked up 81 runs across three innings even as India registered a 2-0 sweep.
Rishabh Pant had hit 185 runs, including 2 fifties, but the wicketkeeper-batter had slipped out of the top 10 for the first time in close to a year.
The change in the top 10 has been affected by Usman Khawaja, who has broken into the top 10 of the Test Batting Rankings. Khawaja was easily the standout batsman in the three-match Test series, having aggregated 496 runs from five innings at a whopping 165.33. His scores in the series read 97, 160, 44*, 91 and 104* – the last two coming in Australia’s series-clinching 115-run win in the third Test in Lahore. That was after he’d begun the year with twin hundreds in the New Year’s Ashes Test in Sydney, which happened to be his comeback to the format after more than two years.
The left-hander leapfrogged David Warner, Rishabh Pant, Virat Kohli, Travis Head and Rohit Sharma respectively to jump up to six spots.
Meanwhile, England skipper Joe Root has slipped to No.4, with Steve Smith and Kane Williamson taking up the No. 2 and 3 positions respectively in a chart led by Marnus Labuschagne. Joshua de Silva’s heroic hundred in Grenada helped him jump 21 spots to No.63.
