Glenn Maxwell - The Best Cricketer of the Week

The allure of the IPL has seen the eyes of the world, drawn to such commercial cathedrals of cricket as Chandigarh, Hyderabad and Jaipur, however the most influential Cricketers of the Week were plying their trade in Dubai, Dhaka and Cambridge. Topping the charts for the third time this year is Glenn Maxwell who has yet again showed himself to be the engine room of Austrian cricket. A total performance from the Victorian has seen him score 348 points for the week and further stretch his lead at the top of the table to 394 points. What is even scarier is that, after scoring 188 runs in a week, he still feels he is not playing at his best. I have said it before but Maxwell really could be the secret weapon for Australia at the World Cup this year. The fact that this is the third time that Maxwell has finished top of our weekly table shows just how dominant he has been so far in 2019. We can also see that he is by far the best Cricketer of 2019. At this point last year there was a mere 67 points between second place Simon Harmer and first place Rashid Khan - the fact that Maxwell has over five times that cushion ahead of Rashid this week shows how comfortable he is at the top of the tree. 

IPL cricket is a batsmen's world. That has been underlined by the vitriol faced by Ravi Ashwin this week when he dared to level the playing field against Jos Buttler. I could write a whole essay on that debacle but I shall refrain. Instead let's look at the fact that to succeed in our overall list in T20 tournaments it really is a batsman's game. If we scrape off the top 3 on our weekly list, almost all the rest have been featuring in the world's premier T20 tournament. Those that have been the most successful are those that have been picking up the most strike rate points. In fact there is a very clear corollary between those players with the highest strike rate points and success in the overall rankings. Rohit Sharma was the highest IPL playing Cricketer on our list with 154 and he was also the player who scored the most points for his strike rate (50). In joint second place with 134 points are Jonny Bairstow and Jos Buttler who also registered high for strike rate with 50 and 30 respectively. The flip side of this are those batsmen who picked up no strike rate points. Shreyas Iyer and Shubman Gill all have batted for at least an innings in the IPL and registered no strike rate points and are seventh and ninth respectively. Both Glenn Maxwell and our IPL boys have proved that unless you go big you might as well go home in 2019. 

For Kuldeep Yadav 2019 has been a year of two halves. Towards the end of February, Yadav had topped the bill once for his performances against Australia and was just off the pack for the top 5 after spending almost all of January in the top 5. Since then he has been relatively ineffective for India in the shorter forms of the game and now has turned up to the IPL showing no signs of this reversing. He has played 2 games for Kolkata thus far and has registered a mere 10 points for a catch. In his first game against Hyderabad Karthik only used him for half of his allocated overs whilst in his second game against Punjab he went wicketless with an economy of 8. This has seen him slide to 12th in the overall table. With T20 and ODI not being Kuldeep's strongest suit, I see his slide down the table being rather foreboding seeming as there is now 5 weeks of IPL followed by an ODI World Cup. By the end of this, Kuldeep may very well be forced into doing a Jadeja and mount a summer comeback from the foot of the table to keep his name in the frame. 

Week 

Glenn Maxwell - 348
Simon Harmer - 202
Abdur Razzak - 170
Rohit Sharma- 154
Jonny Bairstow- 134
Jos Buttler - 134
Ben Stokes - 82
Rashid Khan - 75
Virat Kohli - 66
Morne Morkel- 63
Shreyas Iyer - 54
Jack Leach- 53
Shakib Al Hasan - 20 
Shubman Gill - 18
Kane Williamson - 14
Mohammad Abbas - 10
Kuldeep Yadav- 10

Joe Burns - dnp 
Callum Ferguson - dnp 
Shai Hope - dnp 
Duanne Olivier - dnp 
Wayne Parnell - dnp 
Jeetan Patel - dnp 
Joe Root - dnp 

Overall 

Glenn Maxwell - 1783
Rashid Khan - 1389
Ben Stokes - 1242
Shakib Al Hasan - 1191
Shreyas Iyer - 1178
Virat Kohli- 1142
Rohit Sharma - 1118
Joe Root- 1102
Kane Williamson - 1089
Jonny Bairstow - 970
Jos Buttler - 894
Kuldeep Yadav - 880
Duanne Olivier - 793
Simon Harmer - 702
Joe Burns - 699
Callum Ferguson - 671
Jeetan Patel - 625
Abdur Razzak- 548
Mohammad Abbas - 471
Shai Hope - 465
Shubman Gill - 358
Wayne Parnell - 148
Jack Leach - 118
Morne Morkel - 63