Simon Harmer finishing in top spot in County Championship weeks has been something of a regular fixture this year and it seems fitting that in the final week of the season he sits atop our weekly rankings. What is different this week is the manner in which he has done it. More well known for bowling the ball than hitting or catching it, Harmer bagged headlines this week for a maiden century for Essex and only his second of his career. He also got himself a lot of media attention for a spectacular catch to dismiss County Championship winning captain and flavour of the month Rory Burns. Harmer finishes the busiest part of his season with a thousand point lead over Jeetan Patel - a huge gulf for anyone to hope to catch him. It would take a brave person to not put him as clear favourite for the yearly crown at this point.
His 2018 has been way under par but his September has been red hot. I talk, of course, of Ravi Jadeja. Despite scoring 0 in August and just 25 in July, Jadeja has had something of a renaissance and scored 721 in September. This despite scoring 0 points across the first two weekends. This week he played an integral part in India's progression to the Asia Cup final though his three wickets and 25 runs against Afghanistan. Lest we forget, this is a player who just two weeks ago was settling himself in for his campaign with Saurashtra in the Vijay Hazare Trophy. In this week of inactivity for a majority of our players, Jadeja finds himself the only Cricketer to move up the table - over-taking Nathan Lyon in 18th place. His progression up the table in September has also been strong. He started the month in second bottom position and has overtaken a quintet of Australians in that time (Warner, Smith, both Marshes and Lyon). If he takes this confidence back to India he may yet find himself mid table after all.
It has long been said that if Rashid Khan does not perform for Afghanistan then Afghanistan do not perform. This was brought into focus this week as Afghanistan broke the hearts of every underdog supporter in the land and exited the Asia Cup. In his two Super Four games this week he picked up just three wickets whereas in his three games before that he returned seven. It seems fairly obvious that if your top bowler is underperforming you risk more of a chance of not progressing in a competition, but it seems like Rashid is starting to become a bit of a big game bottler. We saw this in his performances for Hyderabad in the IPL also. He will regularly take threefers in low pressure scenarios and against significantly weaker opponents but when the chips are down he fails to follow through. Despite this, Afghanistan's performances in this tournament have won hearts and minds around the cricketing world and has seen Rashid finish third for the week and named number one ODI bowler to go alongside his T20 crown. So not all that bad of a week. As we go forward one would think that it is only he that is likely to challenge Harmer for top spot overall - it all just depends on what opposition is put before him.
Week
Simon Harmer - 252
Ravi Jadeja - 193
Rashid Khan - 137
Jeetan Patel - 122
Shakib Al Hasan - 30
George Bailey - 27
Jofra Archer- dnp
Hashim Amla - dnp
Quinton De Kock- dnp
AB De Villiers- dnp
JP Duminy- dnp
Dean Elgar - dnp
Aaron Finch- dnp
Virat Kohli - dnp
Nathan Lyon - dnp
Mitchell Marsh - dnp
Shaun Marsh - dnp
Sunil Narine- dnp
Joe Root- dnp
Steve Smith - dnp
David Warner - dnp
Kane Williamson - dnp
Overall
Simon Harmer - 6025
Jeetan Patel - 5011
Rashid Khan - 4872
Jofra Archer - 4213
Jos Buttler - 3974
Virat Kohli- 3502
Sunil Narine- 3410
Joe Root - 3345
Aaron Finch - 3343
Kane Williamson - 3203
Shakib Al Hasan - 2886
Ravi Ashwin - 2581
JP Duminy - 2336
Hashim Amla - 2091
Quinton de Kock - 2020
AB De Villiers- 2010
Dean Elgar- 1980
Ravi Jadeja - 1947
Nathan Lyon - 1833
Mitchell Marsh - 1663
Shaun Marsh- 1498
David Warner - 1401
Steve Smith - 1350
George Bailey - 739
No comments:
Post a Comment