Shakib Al Hasan - The Best Cricketer of the Week

They who like cricket were royally entertained last week with competitions scattered all over the globe in all format. No matter your Domestic or national allegiance there was a game which caught your fancy. The eyes of the cricketing world were inevitably drawn towards England against India - no mean feat for a format which has allegedly been dying for as long as I can remember - however it was away from this spotlight and this format that we see two returning goliaths of this game top scoring for the week. Shakib Al Hasan was the first Cricketer to score back to back Cricketer of the Week accolades before injury led to an underwhelming second quarter of the year. This week his team faced up against West Indies four times (one ODI and three T20Is). The Bangladesh captain was solid in all four games but his piece De resistance came in the second T20I where he scored 60 and bagged two wickets. Overall the player got 140 runs and three wickets but many a point was picked up for economies and strike rates to see him seal top spot for the week. Hasan is joined at the top of the weekly tree by a player who was very much in the mix in the first quarter of the year before likewise dropping away. JP Duminy's Momentum One Day Cup form for the Warriors was exquisite before a break from the game and an underwhelming IPL season saw him slide down the table. On his return to One Day cricket for South Africa he has returned to form with 177 runs to his name in the series against Sri Lanka. Out of all the names on our list it is Duminy who gets the most of his runs in the One Day format. Whilst Harmer and Patel are staples of the Long form stuff, Rashid and Buttler more for the short form and Kohli and Williamson straddling all formats, it is only Duminy who exclusively relies on One Day cricket for his star studded performances. He is the last of a dying breed. Despite the impressive performances from these two men, there has not been a huge amount of forward momentum in the overall table. Shakib remains in eleventh place with an 153 point gap up to Jofra Archer in tenth, whilst Duminy moves up two places to thirteenth. 

I find it hard to adjudicate on who has won the Root v Kohli battle this week. For pedants out there you can't help but say that Root won due to the fact that his team did. Despite this, Kohli's 270 points compared to Root's 114 coupled with Kohli overtaking the England captain again and seizing sixth place overall surely puts the Indian back in the driving seat. One thing that is for sure is that it is as tight as anything on the overall table with Kohli ahead by a mere 9 runs. With the competition between the two men very much represented in the matches themselves, it makes the next 4 Tests very interesting indeed. 

Rashid Khan and Jos Buttler are like ET and Elliot in reverse. If you remember from the tear-jerking and frankly terrifying Steven Spielberg classic , the young man and his extra-terrestrial friend were intractably linked - in this cricketing variant, whenever the Afghanistan player plays well the English player is bound to flop and vice versa. This theory posited last week has been writ large this week where the Sussex Spinner's return to form saw him get his first three figure score in eight weeks. In reply, the Englishman scored a measly one point in the first test against India. With Rashid signing an extension of his contract at Sussex, England fans up and down the land will be wishing nothing but ill will on the young Afghanistan prodigy so that the Test team can turn round their weak middle order. 

The cricketing week has been so dense that if I wrote in detail about all the remarkable performances this post would be delayed even further than it has been. Needless to say in normal weeks we would have focused on such things as:

Aaron Finch and Jofra Archer's continued dominance of the T20 Blast with bat and ball respectively
Ravi Ashwin's hatfull of wickets against England 
Kane Williamson's two man of the match performances for Yorkshire
Quinton de Kock's dramatic return to form for South Africa as he prepares to join Hampshire.

But on a week where no fewer than eight players scored over 200 points one has to be selective. One interesting thing to see is that, despite this high scoring week, the overall table has shown very little movement. At the very top of the table we've seen some incredibly large gaps between players. This allows for dramatically high scoring weeks to only make relatively small dents in the overall table. Or more correctly, it used to. Due to this big scoring week we now see the largest gap on the overall table at a mere 399 between Ravi Ashwin and JP Duminy in tenth and eleventh. Closer to the top of the table there is now just 366 points between Jeetan Patel and Rashid Khan in second and third and 357 between Buttler and Finch in fourth and fifth. These are the three biggest gaps on the overall table. We may see some rather drastic musical chairs in the coming few weeks. 

Week

Shakib Al Hasan - 350
JP Duminy- 337
Ravi Ashwin - 328
Kane Williamson - 298 
Quinton de Kock - 296
Aaron Finch - 283
Virat Kohli - 270
Jofra Archer - 202
Hashim Amla - 191
Rashid Khan - 156
Joe Root - 114
Jeetan Patel - 86
Simon Harmer - 31
Jos Buttler - 1
George Bailey - dnp 
AB De Villiers - dnp 
Dean Elgar- dnp 
Ravi Jadeja - dnp 
Nathan Lyon - dnp 
Mitchell Marsh - dnp 
Shaun Marsh - dnp 
Sunil Narine- dnp 
Steve Smith - dnp 
David Warner - dnp 

Overall

Simon Harmer - 4329
Jeetan Patel - 3985
Rashid Khan - 3619
Jos Buttler - 3414
Aaron Finch - 3057
Virat Kohli- 3009
Joe Root - 2995
Sunil Narine- 2974
Kane Williamson -2799
Jofra Archer - 2735
Shakib Al Hasan - 2582
Ravi Ashwin - 2183
JP Duminy - 2163
AB De Villiers- 2010
Hashim Amla - 1899
Nathan Lyon - 1833
Quinton de Kock - 1793
Dean Elgar- 1686
Shaun Marsh- 1498
Mitchell Marsh - 1425
Ravi Jadeja - 1226
David Warner - 1011
Steve Smith - 965
George Bailey - 631