Even though it has taken longer than we would have expected, we are now seeing the return of our old friends Simon Harmer and Jeetan Patel at the top of the table. After tough opening months to 2019, the return of regular County Championship matches have seen the pair thrive this week with both spinners bagging 8 wickets in an innings. These two players' combined wicket tally for this week stands at a rather impressive 23 and their combined total of 748 makes up 27% of all the points made this season. Despite the extra wicket gained by Jeetan Patel, it is Simon Harmer who edges ahead for his third Cricketer of the Week accolade thanks to an improved amount of runs and catches. However, it is Jeetan Patel who is in the overall lead - he has stormed into second place in the overall table and broken up a top five that has long been dominated by international players. This week has also seen Simon Harmer break into the top 5. If last year is anything to go by, when these players hit their stride there is very little to stop them and with both Warwickshire and Essex in action in the next round of fixtures we may well see another week where these spin twins might leave the mob of World Cup playing Cricketers in the shade.
To play in a World Cup must be one of the defining moments of a player's career and is a moment that must be seized with both hands. With that comes pressure - an amount of pressure that some thrive on but others fail to cope with. One player whose World Cup form appears to be helping him improve from a spell of tepid cricket is Ben Stokes. England's man of the match performer in the opening game against South Africa is looking to escape from a spell of cricket where many have questioned both his batting ability as well as his bowling - something of a problem for an allrounder. After being the stand out performer in the series against West Indies, Stokes has featured in seven gameweeks but has scored over one hundred points in only two of those. This week, he put those doubts behind him and had a perfect match - picking up points from his bowling, batting, strike rate and economy. It couldn't have gone any better for the Durham man. This has been reflected in his lurch up the overall table. Other than Simon Harmer, he was the cricketer to have overtaken the most players this week - moving up four places into seventh. He now sits above long term high flyers Shreyas Iyer and Virat Kohli. A World Cup continuing like this could very well see him become a regular top five fixture as we head into the Ashes.
On the other hand, there are other players who let the grandiose nature of the event get to them. West Indian players do not often present themselves as shrinking violets and there are not many players that last long who do not know how to go big - in both cricketing and personality terms. Shai Hope appears to be different to that. He appears to be more grounded than some of his larger than life team mates - however he has also failed in his first outing in a World Cup. Hope's preparations for the tournament have been directly inverse to Stokes'. The Barbadian has been on a run of performances that left many tipping him to be the one of the stars of the tournament. He finished his warmup games with a score of 101 against New Zealand that forces him up to 4th place for the week - just imagine where he could have been if he had not only scored 11 in his opening game against Pakistan. What is more worrying is that the Pakistan game was a glorified net session for the West Indian batsmen and was treated as such by the likes of Chris Gayle and Nicholas Pooran - however our man Hope failed to live up to these expectations. Lest we forget, however, these expectations are high. His lowly position in the overall table comes from thirteen weeks of inactivity and in his last four weeks he has averaged 75.37 - down from 84.57 before his score of 11. With sterner tests for West Indies round the corner it remains to be seen if Hope will continue to surge towards the top ten or if he will begin to slide back down.
Week
Simon Harmer - 390
Jeetan Patel - 358
Ben Stokes - 289
Shai Hope - 252
Joe Root - 250
Mohammad Abbas - 232
Morne Morkel - 142
Duanne Olivier - 120
Glenn Maxwell - 116
Kuldeep Yadav - 110
Jonny Bairstow- 89
Callum Ferguson - 80
Shakib Al Hasan - 40
Jos Buttler - 38
Rohit Sharma- 19
Rashid Khan - 0
Joe Burns - dnp
Shubman Gill - dnp
Shreyas Iyer - dnp
Jack Leach - dnp
Wayne Parnell - dnp
Abdur Razzak- dnp
Overall
Glenn Maxwell - 3348
Jeetan Patel - 2265
Joe Root- 2216
Simon Harmer - 2153
Jonny Bairstow - 2123
Rashid Khan - 2109
Ben Stokes - 2021
Shreyas Iyer - 1887
Virat Kohli- 1884
Jos Buttler - 1845
Shakib Al Hasan - 1744
Duanne Olivier - 1738
Rohit Sharma - 1650
Kane Williamson - 1566
Wayne Parnell - 1465
Shai Hope - 1418
Kuldeep Yadav - 1161
Morne Morkel - 1075
Mohammad Abbas - 996
Callum Ferguson - 990
Abdur Razzak- 898
Shubman Gill - 846
Jack Leach - 714
Joe Burns - 709
No comments:
Post a Comment