The beauty of sport is that out of nowhere a player who has done nothing special for months can turn on a dime and defy expectation with a stellar run of form. A couple of players did that this week but the most impressive of this bunch was Wayne Parnell. The South African Kolpak player has been one of the most inactive players on our list in 2019 after being a no show in eleven of eighteen gameweeks. When he has played he has been remarkably ineffectual. He turned out once for the Sylhet in the BPL and once again for Islamabad in the PSL before featuring more regularly for Worcestershire in the Royal London One Day Cup. His early season form in this competition hardly set the world alight and he started this week in fifth bottom place with 531 points after a mere 8 wickets from his first 6 games. Fast forward a week and the Port Elizabeth man has got a further 12 wickets from his last three games including two fivefers and a 76 with the bat against Warwickshire. This has seen Parnell register a whopping 485 points this week and almost double his overall tally for the year to 1016. He jumps five places to 16th in the table and is just six points behind early season golden boy Kuldeep Yadav. Parnell's performances have helped propel Worcestershire into the next stage of the One Day Cup so more performances like this could very well be on the cards.
It wasn't only Wayne Parnell that showed his true class this week as two players that have had an ineffectual IPL season turned their own personal tides with some strong performances. Most notable was Shubman Gill who, after a string of very poor scores that I highlighted last week, came out with match altering performance of 76 and 65 against Mumbai and Punjab - both with pretty impressive strike rates. This will boost his abysmal average for the season which stood at 14.22 last week and is now at a slightly more respectable looking 35.87. It is notable that when he opens for Kolkata he performs markedly better than further down the order. He now has three half centuries from his last four outings in this position. This being said it has been a forgettable IPL for the young Indian and he is the lowest scoring IPL player on our list by some distance - 185 points behind teammate Kuldeep Yadav. The second player to show his true class was Kane Williamson. Ultimately one of the most gifted players in world cricket he has been hampered by poor form and has been muscled out of his own team due to the foreign player rule. Before yesterday's game against Bangalore Williamson's IPL average was 8.29 - this from a player whose T20 average is 29.76. His 70 will put a brighter shine on things but to have only scored 160 across the four games he has played this week will be a disappointment.
At the start of April when Duanne Olivier made his debut for Yorkshire against Nottinghamshire his seven wickets had fans of the White Rose salivating at the damage the Kolpak signing would inflict for their club. Since then the scintillating wicket taking that South African fans were so angry at losing out on has failed to emerge. This week Olivier played four times for Yorkshire - one more game than his fellow countryman Wayne Parnell - from this packed schedule he managed to score just 53 points and claim a solitary wicket. In fact in his one County Championship match and the five One Day Cup games he has played since debut he has claimed just four wickets. Olivier currently sits tenth in the overall table - a fairly respectable position - but a majority of his points are still made up from his outings for South Africa. Before his first game for Yorkshire he had 793 points and has gained only 604 in the month that he has been in England. In comparison to bowlers that have featured in a similar number of games in that time; Wayne Parnell has scored 868 and Jeetan Patel 803. Both of whom came with much less fanfare.
Week
Wayne Parnell - 485
Shubman Gill - 241
Glenn Maxwell - 186
Shreyas Iyer - 181
Rashid Khan - 169
Jeetan Patel - 160
Kane Williamson - 160
Morne Morkel - 152
Virat Kohli - 79
Mohammad Abbas - 58
Rohit Sharma - 56
Duanne Olivier - 53
Simon Harmer - 36
Shakib Al Hasan - 29
Callum Ferguson - 27
Joe Root- 17
Jonny Bairstow - dnp
Joe Burns- dnp
Jos Buttler - dnp
Shai Hope - dnp
Jack Leach- dnp
Abdur Razzak- dnp
Ben Stokes - dnp
Kuldeep Yadav- dnp
Overall
Glenn Maxwell - 2922
Shreyas Iyer - 1856
Rashid Khan - 1828
Virat Kohli- 1789
Jonny Bairstow - 1671
Joe Root- 1606
Rohit Sharma - 1505
Ben Stokes - 1483
Jeetan Patel - 1428
Duanne Olivier - 1397
Jos Buttler - 1381
Simon Harmer - 1307
Kane Williamson - 1276
Shakib Al Hasan - 1220
Kuldeep Yadav - 1022
Wayne Parnell - 1016
Abdur Razzak- 898
Shubman Gill - 837
Joe Burns - 699
Callum Ferguson - 698
Morne Morkel - 654
Mohammad Abbas - 529
Shai Hope - 465
Jack Leach - 359
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