Jeetan Patel - The Best Cricketer of the Week

In times gone by Jeetan Patel was a regular table topper but it seemed like those times had gone by as it has been a very long wait for the veteran New Zealander. The last time Patel was the best Cricketer of the Week was in the first week of last September where he got a tenfer for Warwickshire against Middlesex which equaled his best ever yield of wickets in a First Class innings. This week saw him equal his best ever yield for a List A match with a fivefer in his game against Nottinghamshire this week. He added to this accolade a further two wickets against Northamptonshire and 26 runs across all three of his Royal London One Day Cup games this week. This moves him into the middle of the our overall table. Not too shabby at all for a player who just four weeks ago was 17th and had half the 1268 points he now has. It is notable that the shorter the form of the game the lower Patel's scores get, so to score big in a fifty over competition will be a bonus for him and, on the return to County Championship games, I would expect to see him continue his march up the table. 

Although we have assembled an Avengers-like group of Cricketers this year - they have not been able to flex their superpowers as much as we thought in the world's premier T20 tournament. Last week we focussed on the poor form of Kane Williamson and Kuldeep Yadav. This has continued this week with Kane 'Black (Caps) Widow' Williamson registering just 8 runs in his game against Kolkata and Kuldeep 'Falcon' Yadav being erased by his franchise and left on the bench. But it is unfair to focus solely on these two players as there are many more from our list who are failing to impress in IPL2019. Cricket's Incredible Hulk, Ben Stokes, has looked decidedly more like Bruce Banner in his games for Rajasthan. He began the tournament in our overall top 5 but he has scored a mere 123 runs across his eight games, which sees him return to England with a batting average of 15.38 and his overall ranking move down to 7th. Shubman Gill is cricket's Spider-Man. A young impressionable Cricketer that has undeniable skills but needs someone to take him under their wing and mentor him if he is going to reach his potential. Those hawk-eyed cricket fans amongst us will have noticed that he has been spectacularly misfiring this season. Despite playing every single Kolkata game his average currently stands at 14.22 - and even this paltry score is buoyed up by a score of 65 against Delhi. With that score removed he would be in even more peril with an average of just 7.88. Then we come to Shakib Al Hasan. Who is he? Well you might ask. He is Adam Warlock. He is a hugely successful and popular character in times gone by in a format he feels at home in (Shakib topped our league from weeks 4 to weeks 10 thanks to his performances in the BPL). Many of his biggest fans have been expecting him to make it in the big time. However time after time he just never shows up. Shakib has been rather sidelined for Messrs. Bairstow and Williamson in terms of Hyderabad's overseas player. This week he made his return in a game against Chennai in which he seemed seemed like Mr Invisible by registering zero points. It really does seem like these players that we are so used to seeing striding majestically across our cricketing skyline are really struggling this year. I cannot imagine this will be their endgame though as, with the exception of Gill, they will all be back on our silver screens for the World Cup where they will hope to improve. 

Should you think I am being overly negative, I would like to focus on a player who has surprised me by being so consistently good in the IPL. Previously I have spoken about the quiet manner in which Delhi's Shreyas Iyer has been grinding out winning performances for his franchise. Week on week I expect him to drop out of our overall top 5. Last week he threatened to do so after only having a 62 point cushion off sixth place Jonny Bairstow. With Bairstow having another media-grabbingly positive week for Hyderabad I thought it must be time for Iyer to slope off down the table, however he has finished off by moving up to third again thanks to his combination of batting bonus points and points for fielding and strike rate. This is yet another example of the quiet man of Indian cricket going about his business inconspicuously and forcing his own little agenda. The fact that he has been overlooked for the World Cup squad means that he is due a sabbatical away from cricket for a while once the IPL is wrapped up. Surely this will be the time for him to move down - but you never know. Cricket is a funny old game - the player averages 42 in his 5 ODIs for India so a recall is likely at some point. 

Week 

Jeetan Patel - 245 
Morne Morkel - 182
Jonny Bairstow- 180
Glenn Maxwell - 162
Wayne Parnell - 152
Shreyas Iyer - 122
Rohit Sharma - 112
Simon Harmer - 91 
Abdur Razzak - 82 
Rashid Khan - 70
Jack Leach - 50
Ben Stokes - 39
Duanne Olivier - 34
Virat Kohli- 32
Shubman Gill - 27
Kane Williamson - 18 
Shakib Al Hasan - 0 

Mohammad Abbas - dnp 
Joe Burns- dnp 
Jos Buttler - dnp 
Callum Ferguson - dnp 
Shai Hope - dnp 
Joe Root - dnp 
Kuldeep Yadav- dnp 

Overall 

Glenn Maxwell - 2736
Virat Kohli- 1710
Shreyas Iyer - 1675
Jonny Bairstow - 1671
Rashid Khan - 1659
Joe Root- 1589
Ben Stokes - 1483
Rohit Sharma - 1449
Jos Buttler - 1381
Duanne Olivier - 1344
Simon Harmer - 1271
Jeetan Patel - 1268
Shakib Al Hasan - 1191
Kane Williamson - 1116
Kuldeep Yadav - 1022
Abdur Razzak- 898
Joe Burns - 699
Callum Ferguson - 671
Shubman Gill - 596
Wayne Parnell - 531
Morne Morkel - 502
Mohammad Abbas - 471
Shai Hope - 465
Jack Leach - 359

Glenn Maxwell - The Best Cricketer of the Week

2019 is the year of Glenn Maxwell. The man is utterly phenomenal and everything he touches turns good. At this rate his inclusion in the Australian Ashes team is looking ever more likely to go alongside his key position in the one day side for the World Cup and his ongoing success in every domestic side he even looks at. This week he registered 402 points from three games - and did it predominantly through wickets. He has claimed 10 scalps for Lancashire in his four match stint for them getting his career best figures of 5-40 against Middlesex. In comparison he has only scored 181 runs. The fact that we know for a fact that Maxwell can bat quick and bat big means that even performing in just one of his disciplines he can still top our weekly poll as he does this week for the fourth time. Last year it took Simon Harmer (more from him later) until the middle of May to be the first player to four Cricketer of the Week titles. His lead at the top of the overall table is now stretched to an unheard of 896 points as he extends his reign in first place into a seventh week. 

Last year I wrote endlessly about the form of Simon Harmer and Jeetan Patel. Not a week would go by when one of these grand old bowlers would not be mentioned - and not just for their County Championship performances but also for their contributions in their home domestic leagues. This has not been quite so much the case this year. Harmer featured early on in the Momentum One Day Cup for the Warriors but disappeared until his reemergence with Essex over the last couple of weeks. He has nearly half the points he had at this point last year - 1180 in 2019 compared to 2011. The same can be said of Jeetan Patel. The restructuring of the New Zealand cricket season has seen a much greater focus on the T20 game - Patel's weakest format. This has seen him play an awful lot of cricket in the English winter but not particularly allowing him to pick up as many points. He lags behind his 2018 total at this point in the year by 431 points. This being said as the seasons have begun to turn in England and the weather has become distinctly more crickety we have seen these two bowlers bloom like daffodils. Both players have got their highest score for 2019 this season and look promising for things to come. They are also in a much more familiar position on our weekly table - finishing second and third this week. The top four is rounded off by a new bowler to our list who wishes to follow in their mould. Morne Morkel was the Championship's top bowler last season but has had the winter off cricket for the first time since the start of his career. At the start of this week he was bottom placed in the overall league but he has scored more in the last week than he has in the previous fifteen weeks combined. These three Division One bowling stars should be on an upward trajectory from here or in and will be challenging for those top spots soon enough. 

In contrast to the upward surge of the County Championship trio we have seen two stars of world cricket on a downward plummet after a strong start to 2019. In Week Two, Kane Williamson and Kuldeep Yadav were first and second in the overall table. From there on in they spent January and February flirting with the the top 5. At the start of January it was Kuldeep who spent a couple of weeks in the overall top five. The few weeks that followed that saw Kane Williamson in and out. So where are these two international superstars now? Williamson is in 13th place and Kuldeep is in 15th place. Their fall has been precipitous. Weeks five to nine saw the Indian spinner drop from third to twelfth - gaining just 145 points whilst Kane Williamson's fall from grace was brought about by his lack of appearances and then subsequent lack of form in the IPL. In Week 11 Kane Williamson was sixth but Week on Week he has slipped down the table to be less than midway this week. The two players performances this week has been indicative of the form that has seen them slip down the table. Both players have played two games for their IPL teams - Kuldeep got 20 points for a solitary wicket against Bangalore but registered a zero point game against Chennai . Williamson did even worse than that with just six runs split equally across his two games. Both of these players would have seen the IPL as their chance to warm up for the World Cup with a run of good form but are on their way to having to turn around a pretty poor spell of form to improve their fortunes. 

Week

Glenn Maxwell - 402
Simon Harmer - 326 
Jeetan Patel - 280
Morne Morkel - 207
Jonny Bairstow- 202
Virat Kohli- 198
Joe Root - 184
Duanne Olivier - 150
Wayne Parnell - 146 
Abdur Razzak - 123
Rohit Sharma - 108
Rashid Khan - 90 
Shreyas Iyer - 78
Jos Buttler - 53
Shubman Gill - 34
Kuldeep Yadav- 20 
Kane Williamson - 6 

Mohammad Abbas - dnp 
Shakib Al Hasan - dnp 
Joe Burns- dnp 
Callum Ferguson - dnp 
Shai Hope - dnp 
Jack Leach- dnp 
Ben Stokes - dnp 

Overall 

Glenn Maxwell - 2574
Virat Kohli- 1678
Rashid Khan - 1589
Joe Root- 1589
Shreyas Iyer - 1553
Jonny Bairstow - 1491
Ben Stokes - 1444
Jos Buttler - 1381
Rohit Sharma - 1337
Duanne Olivier - 1310
Shakib Al Hasan - 1191
Simon Harmer - 1180
Kane Williamson - 1095
Jeetan Patel - 1023
Kuldeep Yadav - 1022
Abdur Razzak- 816
Joe Burns - 699
Callum Ferguson - 671
Shubman Gill - 569
Mohammad Abbas - 471
Shai Hope - 465
Wayne Parnell - 379
Morne Morkel - 320
Jack Leach - 309

Joe Root - The Best Cricketer of the Week

Cricketers from India have featured rather heavily in our weekly top fives in the last few weeks however this time it is time for the English invasion. Fittingly, at the forefront of this upward surge from English players is their captain Joe Root who has returned to his home club of Yorkshire to get in good touch for the Ashes. This plan seems to be working as he scored 203 runs in the draw with Nottinghamshire. You can couple this with his traditional low economy from a few overs of awkward spin and overall he has looked impressive. Getting himself into the grind of long form cricket before the frippery of the World Cup starts will see Root able to hit the ground running on the 1st of August where he needs to start bucking the trend of being something of a big game bottler of late. Meanwhile 4153 miles away from Nottingham, Root's vice captain Jos Buttler has also been putting a shift in for Rajasthan. Despite poor form from his franchise, Buttler has shown great consistency throughout the IPL and has been regularly blowing teams away with a stunning strike rate. This week he racked up a 43 ball 89 in Rajasthan's victory over Mumbai and 10 ball 23 in their loss to Chennai. When Buttler combines high scoring with quick scoring he is a ballistic missile that destroys his adversary. Whilst Root has been giving Australia food for thought and Buttler has been marking everyone's cards for the World Cup, there is a cue of high performing Englishmen keen to show what they can do. Ben Stokes remains in the top 5 overall despite a relatively quiet week for Rajasthan, Root and Buttler are 6th and 7th and Bairstow sits 8th. You can even look at the weekly results and see that Jack Leach's performance for Somerset this week sees him finish in the top five for the week thanks to a sixfer versus Nottinghamshire that saw him double his overall score for the year. Optimistic is not a word usually associated with the English, however I feel there may be room for it despite the poor series against the West Indies. 

Praise has been heaped on Rashid Khan since he made his debut for Afghanistan against Zimbabwe and he is riding high again; second only to Glenn Maxwell on points for the year. Despite this we might need to start questioning the impact the young man has on games and whether he is as effective as he once was. His main asset was his mystery spin and one of the problems with mystery spin is that once the mystery has been solved it's just spin. We have seen Rashid going from regularly bagging threefers in T20 games to that being a rare event. As ever he has appeared in almost every game Week as he travels the globe between T20 competitions and international fixtures which accounts for his high yield of points but his impact per game is diminishing startlingly. By game week 15 last year had acquired 2178 points - an average of 145.2 a week. This year he has 1499 - 99.93 a week. A deficit equivalent to two wickets, in line with his dip in scalps. What also makes this difference even more stark is the fact that this year's IPL has started earlier - so last year Rashid had picked up this higher yield without having featured for Hyderabad. In the first three weeks of IPL 2018 Rashid totalled 348 points. At the three week point this year he has a mere 185. He is still the second best player in the world - but with this trend will it remain so? 

They have been waiting for a while but there is a pack of players whose bread and butter rely on their County Championship performances. This week we have seen stalwarts such as Jeetan Patel and Simon Harmer register meaningful points alongside the likes of Jack Leach and Duanne Olivier. Once you add into the mix Worcestershire's Wayne Parnell and Surrey's Morne Morkel who have not featured this week, the County Championship will really mix things up. However there is one player who has been playing a blinder all year that has seen this continue into the County grind. Last week Glenn Maxwell was in our top five for his performances for Australia, this week he is there for Lancashire against Loughborough MCCU. A different climate against a very different calibre of opponent and a different form of the game but one thing remained the same. The impact of Maxwell. 119 runs across both innings with a strike rate of 182.22 in the second coupled with a strangling economy with the ball has seen him further stretch his lead to a stunning 673. Yes it is against students but it does bode rather well. This all round all rounder really is proving to be unstoppable in 2019. 

Week

Joe Root - 303
Jos Buttler - 299
Duanne Olivier- 227
Glenn Maxwell - 219
Jack Leach- 191
Shubman Gill - 140
Simon Harmer - 132
Jeetan Patel - 118
Virat Kohli - 107
Ben Stokes- 105
Abdur Razzak- 88
Rohit Sharma- 67
Kuldeep Yadav - 42
Rashid Khan - 40
Shreyas Iyer - 6 
Jonny Bairstow- 1

Mohammad Abbas - dnp 
Shakib Al Hasan - dnp 
Joe Burns - dnp 
Callum Ferguson - dnp 
Shai Hope - dnp 
Morne Morkel- dnp 
Wayne Parnell - dnp 
Kane Williamson - dnp 

Overall 

Glenn Maxwell - 2172
Rashid Khan - 1499
Virat Kohli- 1480
Shreyas Iyer - 1475
Ben Stokes - 1444
Joe Root- 1405
Jos Buttler - 1328
Jonny Bairstow - 1289
Rohit Sharma - 1229
Shakib Al Hasan - 1191
Duanne Olivier - 1160
Kane Williamson - 1089
Kuldeep Yadav - 1002
Simon Harmer - 834
Jeetan Patel - 743
Joe Burns - 699
Abdur Razzak- 693
Callum Ferguson - 671
Shubman Gill - 535
Mohammad Abbas - 471
Shai Hope - 465
Jack Leach - 309
Wayne Parnell - 233
Morne Morkel - 113

Jonny Bairstow - The Best Cricketer of the Week

The sight of a rejuvenated Jonny Bairstow opening the batting for any team is a sight for sore eyes for England fans in the eve of the World Cup. The players has looked rather beleaguered of late. The Bairstow of last Summer was firing on all cylinders - three centuries in succession and four in the space of three months made him a force to be reckoned with. Then came a barren spell with no centuries and only two half centuries in 12 games for England. He was one of the more unimpressive performers in all three formats of the series against West Indies and question marks were being drawn above his head by amateur selectors. He is now second in the IPL run scoring rankings with 262 in five games and he looks like a player reborn. To put this in comparison, Bairstow's last three T20 games in an England shirt saw him average 39 against the West Indies. His three games this week has seen him average 59.33 - the highlight being his 114 runs off 56 balls with 12 fours and 7 sixes. Such is the poor form of Bairstow in the early part of 2019 that, despite being joint fifth last week and first this week, he still finds himself outside of the top five on the overall table - trailing Ben Stokes by 51 points. It is very difficult to compare international games to the IPL - however if it is form and confidence we are talking about, Bairstow will be joining up with his English compatriots with buckets of it. 

India's captain is finding it much harder to captain Bangalore than he does his national team - and that is saying something. Undoubtably Virat Kohli is a once in a generation player - but too often we see these amazing players thrust the captaincy of teams as they are guaranteed a place rather than for their credentials as a captain. There have always been swirling buzzards of discontent circling Virat's captaincy but this week has seen them swoop down to pick at the carcass of Bangalore's IPL season. Virat's inept nature as a captain is usually well hidden by the fact that India's talent on the pitch sees them prevail. In Australia there were some very odd team selections, daft field settings and nonsensical bowling choices but they still walked away with a drawn T20 series and victories in the Tests and ODIs. For Bangalore he is not having such luck. Instead he is having to mask his inadequacy through trying to carry the team on his own. His 231 points this week is his third highest of the year - however he appears to be batting long rather than batting well. Today's game against Delhi is a case in point of this. He picked up 61 points for scoring 41 at a strike rate of 124.24 spanning 17 overs. He only played at 26 out of the 81 balls bowled and absorbed 17 consecutive singles. Decent points scored - but to the detriment of his team. He is still one of the highest performers in the IPL of all our contributors - but at what cost to his reputation? 

After a strong showing in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, Shreyas Iyer has continued his fine spell of form into the IPL. He is not grabbing the headlines as some of the other players on the list but his 215 runs across six games sees him in third place - above such media darlings as Andre Russell, Rishabh Pant and Jos Buttler. The secret to Iyer's success has been consistency. Half of his six innings have seen him score over 40 runs and his lowest score in the tournament has been 16. He is regularly grinding out scores from first drop that guide his team's through that difficult transition period and usher them towards victory. He is so ridiculously consistent that over his last ten innings he has scored 43 runs three times. It is not just in total runs scored that we see this lack of variability for the Indian. In each of his four innings this week he has strike rates north of 100 but never edging over 150. This ensures he is always scoring at least run a ball but never forgetting the value of his wicket. Iyer is following the JP Duminy model to success - last year it was the South African player who was the quiet man at the top of the table - however he will hope to not fade away like JPD did. Integral to this is earning himself a place in the India squad for the World Cup. That all important fourth batting spot is still up for grabs and many believe that whoever impresses in the IPL can grab it. With Iyer being the top Indian run scorer, it is within his grasp. 

Week

Jonny Bairstow- 318
Shreyas Iyer- 291 
Virat Kohli - 231
Glenn Maxwell - 170
Duanne Olivier - 140
Jos Buttler - 135
Ben Stokes - 97
Wayne Parnell - 85
Kuldeep Yadav- 80
Rashid Khan - 70
Abdur Razzak- 57
Morne Morkel- 50
Rohit Sharma- 44
Shubman Gill - 37
Mohammad Abbas - dnp 
Shakib Al Hasan - dnp 
Joe Burns- dnp 
Callum Ferguson - dnp 
Simon Harmer - dnp 
Shai Hope - dnp 
Jack Leach- dnp 
Joe Root- dnp 
Jeetan Patel - dnp 
Kane Williamson - dnp 

Overall 

Glenn Maxwell - 1953
Shreyas Iyer - 1461
Rashid Khan - 1459
Virat Kohli- 1373
Ben Stokes - 1339
Jonny Bairstow - 1288
Shakib Al Hasan - 1191
Rohit Sharma - 1162
Joe Root- 1102
Kane Williamson - 1089
Jos Buttler - 1029
Kuldeep Yadav - 960
Duanne Olivier - 933
Simon Harmer - 702
Joe Burns - 699
Callum Ferguson - 671
Jeetan Patel - 625
Abdur Razzak- 605
Mohammad Abbas - 471
Shai Hope - 465
Shubman Gill - 395
Wayne Parnell - 233
Jack Leach - 118
Morne Morkel - 113