Sunil Narine - The Best Cricketer of the Week

Could a player this year make more of an impact in one week than the dominance Sunil Narine has shown in the West Indies' Regional Super50 competition? The unlikeable mystery spinner has not played a game since the start of December when he turned out for the Dhaka Dynamites in the Bangladesh Premier League but he did not show any sign of rustiness as he scorched a 46 ball 51 for Trinidad and Tobago in the opening game against Barbados. He has since added to that with 10 wickets in three games over five days - his best being a stunning 5-10 over the Combined Campuses and Colleges team. His economy in all three games has been under three and his form must be leaving the West Indies team bitter at the fact that the precocious spinner still refuses to turn out for his national side, outside of major competitions. His 487 points in a week is the highest by an individual player so far in 2018 and catapults him up the overall table, putting him one position above Nathan Lyon - the first cricketer of the week from Week 1. If his dominance in this competition continues who knows how many points he can rack up. 

I thought that this might be the year for Kane Williamson to put himself back amongst the top batsmen in the world. A few years ago the four key batsmen of Kohli, Smith, Root and Williamson were setting the cricketing world alight. The first two have accelerated into the stratosphere, the third one has remained treading water whilst the last one....appears to be stagnating. He scored 17 runs across his two T20 games for New Zealand this week taking his run of single figure scores to three in a row. His average for 2018 stands at 31.4 but if you remove his two big scores against Pakistan it is a more worrying 15.75. Williamson needs to use the triangular tournament against England and Australia to turn his year around. 

I am still surprised to see JP Duminy at the top of the overall rankings - especially when his transition from domestic cricket back to international cricket ended with a thunderingly disappointing yield of just 12 runs. Despite this lack of form, that began in his final few games in the Momentum One Day Cup, there is only Joe Root who may overtake him in the near future. Shakib is injured, Mitchell Marsh is not selected for the T20 series and Jos Buttler is just too far off the pace. Regardless of his performances this week I still expect to see the unlikely figure of JP Duminy atop the overall list next week. 

With Duminy unexpected at the top, who here expected to see David Warner at the bottom? Only Jeetan Patel sits between Warner and the very bottom of the table - and the veteran New Zealander has played 4 less games than Warner. Warner finds himself in the rather ignominious position that George Bailey found himself in for a number of weeks over January; namely scoring more points with his work in the field compared to his batting. Even more gallingly, Bailey now sits seven places above the stand in Australian captain with 129 points separating them. 

Week 

Sunil Narine 487
Virat Kohli 162
Mitchell Marsh 106
George Bailey 103
Joe Root 92
Jos Buttler 61
David Warner 61
Shaun Marsh 60 
Quinton de Kock 44
Jofra Archer 30
Kane Williamson 27 
Dean Elgar 20
Rashid Khan 20
Hashim Amla 16
JP Duminy 12
Steve Smith 12 
Nathan Lyon 1
Shakib Al Hasan dnp 
Ravi Ashwin dnp
Simon Harmer dnp
Ravi Jadeja dnp
AB De Villiers dnp
Aaron Finch dnp 
Jeetan Patel dnp

Overall

JP Duminy - 761
Joe Root - 622
Shakib Al Hasan - 608
Mitchell Marsh - 605
Jos Buttler - 597
Aaron Finch - 591
Virat Kohli- 538
Kane Williamson - 497
Sunil Narine- 487
Nathan Lyon - 466
Ravi Ashwin - 435
Jofra Archer - 405
Rashid Khan - 390
Simon Harmer - 351
George Bailey - 344
AB De Villiers- 321
Quinton de Kock - 315
Hashim Amla - 289
Dean Elgar- 286
Steve Smith - 275
Shaun Marsh- 256
David Warner - 215
Jeetan Patel - 108
Ravi Jadeja - ytp