The achievement of a five wicket haul should be a relatively rare thing. An accolade that even the best bowlers strive for. For Simon Harmer these come with an unnatural ease. This week's 5/23 and 7/38 against Hampshire was his third and fourth haul of five wickets or more for Essex since the resumption of the County Championship in mid-May. In the last four games the South African spinner has accrued an incredible 32 wickets and leads the overall table for most wickets for the season - with Jeetan Patel in second. His 364 points seems him claim his fourth Cricketer of the Week accolade - just one behind Glenn Maxwell's total of 5. It also moves him back up into the overall top 5, leapfrogging fifth place and settling in fourth spot just behind Jeetan Patel. Harmer has rightfully claimed his place as the star player in an Essex side that boasts the cricketing lord, Alistair Cook, and might just be the best international signing Essex have ever had. Essex's match against table-topping Somerset starts today and, in the form he is in, there is no reason why Harmer cannot lurch up the table again.
Do strike rates mean nothing in the modern game? I thought we lived in a T20 era where the order of the day was bat on ball and blazing stonking scores off a hand full of deliveries was De rigeur- if not De Villiers. The biggest proponent of that - Glenn Maxwell - strides majestic at the top of our overall table but this week we have seen Kane Williamson finish second boasting relatively mediocre strike rates despite two hundreds. His strike rate across his two innings was just 86.46 - relatively low by modern standard...but this was enough to see his side over the line in both instances and see him get his highest weekly score of 2019 by some distance. Incredibly Kane Williamson has still not won Cricketer of the Week despite his inclusion in our list since January 2018 - surely the highest profile player not to have finished top of the tree. The problem of low strike rates is not peculiar to just Williamson. Across the six West Indies games, Shai Hope has scored 187 runs in a tournament where he has either gone big or got out. Despite scores of 96 against Bangladesh and 68 against Australia, his average strike rate sits at just 67.75. For a West Indian player this is a statistic that almost amounts to treason. Strike rate is still a key part to the short form of the game but as Kane Williamson has proved, it is not the be all and end all.
Does one big record breaking performance followed by a failure amount to more than two average performances? Where hugely impressive performances with the bat may stick in the consciousness a little easier, they are actually not as impactful as a player grinding out two half-centuries. One of the best individual performances of the Week came from Rohit Sharma whose 140 against Pakistan was the sixth highest score of the World Cup thus far and came in a game where the word 'pressure' doesn't even come close. Rohit's innings will live long in the memory.....but it was followed by failure against Afghanistan yesterday and subsequently The Hitman ends the week outside the top five. He is knocked into seventh position by Joe Root and Virat Kohli - two players who did not reach the dizzying heights that Rohit did but both scored half centuries at an average strike rate. This is what this point system rewards - not purely pyrotechnics but a player's impact on the game, fixture in and fixture out. This week Joe Root displaced Jeetan Patel in second place and rightfully so as he is the core player in England's side. If this dependability continued he may be able to continue his high-flying 2019 into The Ashes.
Week
Simon Harmer - 364
Kane Williamson - 334
Shakib Al Hasan - 275
Joe Root - 235
Virat Kohli - 224
Wayne Parnell - 217
Rohit Sharma - 191
Jeetan Patel - 189
Ben Stokes - 184
Jonny Bairstow - 140
Shai Hope - 137
Mohammad Abbas - 110
Kuldeep Yadav - 101
Callum Ferguson - 89
Glenn Maxwell - 82
Rashid Khan - 72
Jos Buttler - 32
Joe Burns - dnp
Shubman Gill - dnp
Shreyas Iyer - dnp
Jack Leach- dnp
Morne Morkel- dnp
Duanne Olivier - dnp
Abdur Razzak - dnp
Overall
Glenn Maxwell - 3708
Joe Root- 2859
Jeetan Patel - 2827
Simon Harmer - 2635
Jonny Bairstow - 2521
Shakib Al Hasan - 2499
Rashid Khan - 2395
Ben Stokes - 2344
Virat Kohli- 2278
Jos Buttler - 2164
Rohit Sharma - 2100
Kane Williamson - 2049
Shreyas Iyer - 1887
Duanne Olivier - 1852
Wayne Parnell - 1753
Shai Hope - 1694
Morne Morkel - 1502
Kuldeep Yadav - 1302
Mohammad Abbas - 1186
Callum Ferguson - 1080
Shubman Gill - 1039
Abdur Razzak- 898
Jack Leach - 779
Joe Burns - 709
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