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
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