England players celebrate an Aussie wicket.
After whitewashing their arch rivals in the recent five-match ODI series, England players have more reasons to cheer about as they find themselves taking giant leaps across the ladder in the MRF Tyres ICC ODI Player Rankings, which were updated on Monday 25 June.
Their top run-getters in the series were Jason Roy (304), Jonny Bairstow (300), Jos Buttler (275) and Alex Hales (232), and all of them looked good on the table for batters. (Also Read: Jos Buttler is better than MS Dhoni in white-ball cricket: Tim Paine)
Bairstow moved up four spots to No.11, Buttler, the Player of the Series, went up to No.16 after a gain of two positions, Roy entered the top 20 after gaining three positions, while Hales and Eoin Morgan, the captain who scored 151 runs, benefitted too.
Joe Root, England’s Test captain, didn’t have a great series himself. Just 104 runs with one score of 50 in five innings meant that Root lost three spots to go to No.6. With the suspended David Warner slipping too, Babar Azam moved up behind No.1 Virat Kohli, and Rohit Sharma (No.4) and Ross Taylor (No.5) gained too despite not being in action. (Also Read: Centurion Jos Buttler helps England beat Australia to sweep series 5-0)
Shaun Marsh was the standout performer for the Kangaroos, slamming two centuries on his way to scoring 288 runs. That helped him re-enter the table at No.80, while Travis Head, who scored three half-centuries, reached a career-best 670 points, putting him at No.19, up by three spots.
The big mover on the table, meanwhile, was Scotland's Calum MacLeod, whose 94-ball 140* in that famous win over England has taken him 20 spots up to No.35 with a career-high 585 points.
England’s wins were scripted as much by their marauding batsmen as by Moeen Ali and Adil Rashid, their spin twins, who returned 12 wickets apiece at remarkable economy rates of 5.09 and 5.60 respectively.
While that didn’t dislodge Jasprit Bumrah and Rashid Khan from the top of the chart, they both moved up significantly. The England leg-spinner gained three spots to be joint-eighth with Yuzvendra Chahal – his 667 points at the end of the series only 10 points behind the 677 he had reached after the third ODI at Trent Bridge, where he returned 4/47.
Ali, who kept Australia quiet almost each time in the middle overs, gained 12 positions to get to No.13, his 629 points a career-high mark too.
As far as the team rankings are concerned, the winless outing in England has pushed world champions Australia down to sixth place with 101 points, one less than Pakistan, while England have consolidated their position at the top with 125 rating points, three ahead of India at No.2.
