Simon Harmer - The Best Cricketer of the Week

I am an unashamed fan of Simon Harmer. For a man to perform so consistently week in week out, in whatever competition he participates in is something worthy of credit. He has had another stellar week with 9 wickets in his game against Cape Cobras. He has coupled this with thirty points for runs scored and ten points for his strike rate - something that has been happening ever more regularly for the South African. Another string to his already fairly string heavy bow. His 290 this week is enough to see him take first place for the week and return to his place at the top of the tree in the overall league. This is something that we became familiar with in 2018 - with Harmer leading the pack for the last third of the year - but could this be a sign that Harmer may potentially outstrip last year's success? This time last year, Harmer had 351 points - this year he has 130 more than that. Furthermore it wasn't until the English Summer and his exploits in the County Championship that we saw him reach the pinnacle of the overall table. But yet here he is in top spot in just Week three. Could Harmer's 2019 total outstrip his 8426 points of last year? 

I'm not the first to say that Joe Root always performs better in Tour matches than he does in the Test matches but that has been brought into sharp focus with his point scoring this week. 237 points from the warm up game against the West Indies President's XI is a good yield - especially when you take into consideration that, unlike his other England team mates on the list, he only played in one of the two fixtures. Another eyebrow raising figure is the three wickets that he took to claim him 60 points from just his bowling. This is a pattern we saw last year and is a situation that Joe Root exploits much more than any other player on our list. If we compare the feast that Root indulged in against the West Indies' side and compare it to the rest of the England players we see that he did disproportionately better than Ben Stokes and leagues better than Jack Leach and Jos Buttler - all three of whom played both matches. So what does this say about Root? That he doesn't drop his focus regardless of the opposition? That he cares more about these tour matches? That he feels he will be unduly criticised if he were to not succeed? One thing that is clear is the stark difference between this week's bumper yield of points and the meagre pickings he has had in the BBL. He has scored double the amount of points this week than he has in the whole of his time with the Sydney Thunder. I think the bell has tolled on Joe Root's T20 aspirations. Time to move on to bigger and longer things. 

I think it must be pretty hard being a professional sportsman. One week you can be riding high whilst the next you are in the doldrums. Kuldeep Yadav is a case in point of this. Last week's top scorer with 223 points sees himself register 0 this week. This is zero points for a game that he played in and bowled 10 overs. After this performance he was then dropped for the third ODI. This really is a confusing period of time for the young Indian spinner. This confusion only becomes slightly more mystifying when you see that Kuldeep plays proportionately better when India are on the back foot. His table topping Week came from a drawn Test and a lost ODI, whilst this week's pointless yield saw two Indian victories and a series claimed by his nation. On his day Kuldeep can be destructive but, as is the case with the second ODI, he can also come across as relatively ineffectual. It goes without saying that this poor week has changed his overall position, dropping from second place to just outside the top ten. It is still early days and hard to tell which of these two points he will come to rest at. 

Week

Simon Harmer - 290
Shakib Al Hasan - 257
Duanne Olivier - 251
Mohammad Abbas - 250
Joe Root - 237
Virat Kohli- 210
Glenn Maxwell - 181
Ben Stokes - 166
Jonny Bairstow - 142
Rohit Sharma - 72
Jack Leach - 65
Rashid Khan - 58
Joe Burns - 56
Callum Ferguson - 28
Jos Buttler - 13
Jeetan Patel - 1
Kuldeep Yadav - 0

Shubman Gill - dnp 
Kane Williamson - dnp 

Shai Hope - ytp 
Shreyas Iyer - ytp 
Morne Morkel - ytp 
Wayne Parnell - ytp 
Abdur Razzak - ytp 

Overall 

Simon Harmer - 480
Shakib Al Hasan - 465
Duanne Olivier - 421
Glenn Maxwell - 376
Mohammad Abbas - 360
Joe Root- 288
Rohit Sharma - 265
Rashid Khan - 262
Virat Kohli- 236
Kane Williamson - 232
Kuldeep Yadav - 223
Ben Stokes - 166
Jonny Bairstow - 142
Jos Buttler - 131
Shubman Gill - 129
Callum Ferguson - 106
Joe Burns - 92
Jeetan Patel - 91
Jack Leach - 65

Shai Hope - ytp 
Shreyas Iyer - ytp 
Morne Morkel - ytp 
Wayne Parnell - ytp 
Abdur Razzak- ytp