Wayne Parnell - The Best Cricketer of the Week

In a week where many of the players on our list were still on rest and recuperation, another group played in two or more games. Unsurprisingly it is those players who have featured multiple times that have prospered on our weekly top 5. Wayne Parnell tops the tree after having played in a solitary County Championship Division Two fixture of the week as well as featuring in the T20 Blast, whilst Rashid Khan has played four T20 games for Sussex and Glenn Maxwell and Jeetan Patel have featured three times in the shortest form of the game. This top of the table performance for Parnell marks a return to form after a long period of inactivity. Before last week's score of 20, Parnell had not featured for three weeks. This week's score of 251 is his highest scoring week since Week 21 where he also finished as the Best Cricketer of the Week. This is proof positive that when Parnell plays, he plays well and scores big. As it stands he has been too inconsistent and still languishes at the top of our bottom third, however T20 is Parnell's favoured format so with a return to regular games in the Blast he may well push on up into a mid table pack that are very close together in terms of points. 

I will not be surprising anyone with the following statement: Jonny Bairstow is in poor form. In this week's Test against Ireland Jonny Bairstow got a pair, however his batting performances have been long since deteriorating. In his last 22 Tests he averages 27.3. In the previous 22 Tests before that he averaged 54.8. In his last 4 Tests he has scored 35 runs at an average of 5. This is torrid long term form. However if we consult our overall list of the most prolific Cricketers in world cricket we see him 6th, in front of the likes of Virat Kohli and Kane Williamson. However a large slice of these points came from his impeccable spell in the IPL - and it seems like it may be this that has thrown Bairstow off kilter. Anyone watching his unusually aggressive batting stance in his first innings against Ireland, might have been excused for thinking we might have been in over 16 of an IPL game - not a team rocking at 36-3 in a Test match. Bairstow needs to remember the discrete skills that are needed for Test match batting quick smart otherwise he could be in for a humiliating time against Messrs. Hazlewood, Cummins and Pattinson. 

Jack Leach, ladies and gentlemen. What is there to say? Leach has had a bit of a renaissance in our overall rankings of late, this being his third time in a row he has featured in the top five for the week - however nobody would have expected him to have done so off the back of his batting. There were stats aplenty about the bespectacled 'all-rounder'. Since 2017, no other England opener apart from Alastair Cook has scored as many runs in an innings at home. This is especially unusual when you look at his most recent innings. Over his last 13 innings Leach's scores were: 1*, 0, 1, 0, 5, 3*, 2*, 5, 5*, 5, 0, 9 and 6. His next score of 92 certainly does seem incongruous. His decent last 3 weeks has seen him pick up 564 points and move from 20th to 17th on the overall list. What is galling for the spinner is that it still looks unlikely that he will make the cut for the Ashes? A return to Somerset will not be a bad thing for his points, but to go from a Man of the Match performance in one Test to be dropped in the next is tough. Another player who has definitely been discarded for The Ashes is Joe Burns. After a protracted lay off due to viral fatigue, Burns returned to action with Australia A and a Graeme Hick XII to score 170 runs in three games, the large bulk of these coming from 133 for Australia A vs Sussex. The preceding scores of 19 and 18 did not please the selectors and they plumped for Wade and Bancroft over Burns. Just as with Leach, this seems harsh. Burns was Australia's top scorer with 180 in Australia's most recent Test and averages 40 in Test cricket with four centuries from 16 Tests. It is slightly less clear what the future holds for Burns. He was contracted to Lancashire before his illness so may return there, otherwise we may be seeing another period away from the game for the man who sits second bottom of our overall list for the year. 

Week

Wayne Parnell - 251
Rashid Khan - 203
Glenn Maxwell - 193
Jack Leach - 123
Jeetan Patel - 121
Shubman Gill - 109
Callum Ferguson - 106
Shreyas Iyer - 91
Joe Root- 83
Duanne Olivier - 41
Simon Harmer - 29
Joe Burns - 28
Jonny Bairstow - 10 

Mohammad Abbas - dnp 
Shakib Al Hassan - dnp 
Jos Buttler - dnp 
Virat Kohli - dnp 
Shai Hope - dnp 
Morne Morkel - dnp 
Abdur Razzak - dnp 
Rohit Sharma - dnp 
Ben Stokes - dnp 
Kane Williamson - dnp 
Kuldeep Yadav - dnp 

Overall 

Glenn Maxwell - 4237
Jeetan Patel - 3569
Simon Harmer - 3562
Joe Root- 3174
Shakib Al Hasan - 2990
Jonny Bairstow - 2965
Ben Stokes - 2805
Rashid Khan - 2707
Rohit Sharma - 2598
Virat Kohli- 2587
Jos Buttler - 2476
Kane Williamson - 2404
Duanne Olivier - 2225
Shreyas Iyer - 2144
Morne Morkel - 2092
Wayne Parnell - 2024
Shai Hope - 1861
Jack Leach - 1683
Mohammad Abbas - 1655
Callum Ferguson - 1581
Kuldeep Yadav - 1402
Shubman Gill - 1357
Joe Burns - 928
Abdur Razzak- 898

Simon Harmer - The Best Cricketer of the Week

He is top of the pops again. In the 81 weeks we have been monitoring Simon Harmer he has been Cricketer of the Week 13 times but this is the first time he has won the accolade in back to back weeks. This time out it was predominantly his eight wickets plus 43 runs for Essex in the County Championship that saw the South African spinner take the initiative against his compatriots. This match was a battle royale between Essex's Harmer and his next closest rival, Warwickshire's Jeetan Patel. At the start of the week, Patel had a 116 point lead over Harmer, however the veteran New Zealand spinner only mustered half the amount of points that Harmer managed. This has seen the two bowling stalwarts swap positions, with Harmer now 55 points clear of Patel. There is quite a large caveat to this though. We are now entering a month of Vitality Blast games. Despite Harmer being made captain for the shortest form of the game, it is by far his weakest format individually. This can be reflected in the fact that Essex have already played two games in the Blast and Harmer has yielded the grand total of seven runs. Patel equally struggles in the shortest form, but also performed to a decent standard in the Super Smash earlier in the year. I would give Patel the slight edge over Harmer in T20 games so Patel may very well have a month to edge ahead. Alternatively Fourth placed Joe Root may well use the forthcoming Test against Ireland and the Ashes to overturn the 500 points he needs to overtake the both of them. Second to fourth place is all pretty open. 

Well the World Cup turned out pretty well in the end. For all the naysayers, moaners and purveyors of scorn, it will go down as a fairly decent edition of the premier international event in world cricket. But who got the most out of it from our list? Twelve competitors from our list of 24 participated in the World Cup, scoring a total of 9764 points between them; but who are the biggest winners and the weediest losers. Three players from our list scored over 1000 points across the tournament: Shakib Al Hasan (1286), Joe Root (1125) and Ben Stokes (1073). These three are the biggest winners from the tournament. Shakib edges it for me due to his 161 extra points on Joe Root. Lest we forget these points were also accrued over three less games than Root and Stokes due to injury and the early elimination of Bangladesh. He is also, by far, the biggest mover up the overall table, starting the competition in 11th place and finishing it in 5th. Ben Stokes moved up from 10th to 7th, whilst Root's massive score of 1125 sees him gain no ground and remain in fourth position. Another big mover was India's Rohit Sharma - accruing 967 points in his 10 games, he finishes the tournament in 8th spot. Now we move to the biggest losers - and I think these are slightly more obvious. In terms of points accrued over the tournament, Kuldeep Yadav continued his poor spell in the IPL to add a paltry 351 across 9 games. This exacerbated his slide down the table going from 16th at the end of May down to 21st this week. As it stands only three players rank lower than Kuldeep; Shubman Gill, Joe Burns, who was out with injury for seven weeks and inactive for a further seven before that and Abdur Razzak, who has not played since April. However that descent of five places is nothing compared to the fall from grace we have seen from Rashid Khan. Starting the tournament in 2nd place, Rashid went on to collect only 351 points in his nine games and now finishes the tournament in 10th. As I have mentioned previously here, Rashid's numbers are way down on 2018 and he will be hoping to use the Vitality Blast to turn this around. Finally there are three other players who have made a negative impact on their overall placings. Virat Kohli's distinctly average World Cup yielded 770 points and saw him drop from 7th to 9th. Jos Buttler did not bat often enough for him to be a massive scorer in the tournament. He scored 669 points and dropped from 8th to 11th. Most surprisingly is Jonny Bairstow who was riding high after the IPL and started the tournament in third place and went on to score 921 points, the sixth highest in the tournament. Bairstow is a victim of the surge up the table of Shakib in the World Cup but also the re-emergence of that man, Harmer. There is still a lot of cricket to play on 2019 and plenty of time for Shakib to drop down again and Kohli and Rashid to fight back but one feels that flops like this could prove decisive when we do our final count in December. 

In my analysis of our World Cup performers I was forced to use last week's total of 3805 points for Glenn Maxwell, because The Big Show had very little impact on the biggest stage. With just 573 points he was the third worst performer on our list after Kuldeep and Rashid. The messages about Maxwell's international future are decidedly mixed. On one hand he is a busted flush and Justin Langer would be a laughing stock if he ever looked at him again; on the other hand he was woefully mismanaged and still has something to offer. Whichever way you look at it, he then goes on to join straight back up with Lancashire and forces me to backdate his score as he goes on to score 239 points in a single game against Sussex and finishes second in the weekly table. That's nearly half of what he got in the entire World Cup. Yes, I know Maxwell has only played seven Tests. And yes, I know County Championship Division Two is hardly the crucible of fast bowling that The Ashes will be but for Lancashire, Maxwell has a strike rate of 62.50 with the bat. He has an average of 18.50 with the ball (which is the 13th best in the league). His economy is 2.64 and he has bagged 5/40 against Middlesex. Is he a dead cert for a position in the Test side for The Ashes? Certainly not. Should he be considered a squad option. I think he probably should be. 

Week

Simon Harmer - 310
Glenn Maxwell - 239
Shubman Gill - 199
Jack Leach - 190
Jeetan Patel - 159
Ben Stokes - 122
Morne Morkel - 119
Jos Buttler - 106
Duanne Olivier - 102
Mohammad Abbas - 84
Shreyas Iyer - 69
Callum Ferguson - 56
Jonny Bairstow - 36
Kane Williamson - 30
Joe Burns - 28
Wayne Parnell - 20
Joe Root - 17

Shakib Al Hasan - dnp 
Shai Hope - dnp 
Rashid Khan - dnp 
Virat Kohli - dnp 
Abdur Razzak - dnp 
Rohit Sharma - dnp 
Kuldeep Yadav - dnp 

Overall 

Glenn Maxwell - 4044
Simon Harmer - 3553
Jeetan Patel - 3498
Joe Root- 3091
Shakib Al Hasan - 2990
Jonny Bairstow - 2955
Ben Stokes - 2805
Rohit Sharma - 2598
Virat Kohli- 2587
Rashid Khan - 2504
Jos Buttler - 2476
Kane Williamson - 2404
Duanne Olivier - 2184
Morne Morkel - 2092
Shreyas Iyer - 2053
Shai Hope - 1861
Wayne Parnell - 1773
Mohammad Abbas - 1655
Jack Leach - 1560
Callum Ferguson - 1475
Kuldeep Yadav - 1402
Shubman Gill - 1248
Joe Burns - 900
Abdur Razzak- 898

Simon Harmer - The Best Cricketer of the Week

Simon Harmer's march up the table looks close to being unstoppable. Another eight wickets for Essex against Yorkshire sees him finish as the best Cricketer of the Week for the fifth time this year and limes him up for another tussle with Jeetan Patel. Throughout 2018 we saw the trio of Harmer, Patel and Rashid Khan grappling for first, second and third as the year progressed. As we creep over the halfway mark of the year, we see a similar thing happening again, however it is Glenn Maxwell who makes up the third player. Thanks to his 50 wickets so far this season, Harmer is now 116 points off Jeetan Patel - and would have overtaken him if it were not for the remarkable 70 runs that the veteran New Zealand player robbed from Hampshire. In turn, Patel is now just 466 points away from long time leader Glenn Maxwell. It now seems unlikely that Maxwell will join up with the Australia Test squad for the Ashes, so we may see him return to Lancashire for a spell. This could be a tussle that continues through until September but I suspect that Harmer may very well be our number one Cricketer in the world by the end of August in his current form. 

How we love an underdog! Now the World Cup is winding down and we are returning to the cricketing normality of players featuring in one game per week, we have seen an upward surge from some of our more lowly placed contributors. Four of our top six players for the week are in the bottom third of the table for the year and many of them are using the County season to boost their scores now that the limelight is moving away from the very top echelons of the game. Jack Leach is a player who will still harbour aspirations of a recall to the England side for the Ashes series and his spurt up the table in the last month will have helped his cause. Over his last three fixtures he has picked up 14 wickets and moved himself from second bottom to 21st. His seven wickets against Nottinghamshire sees him finish second this week. Callum Ferguson is another player who has been underwhelming in the County Championship for Worcestershire. Last week's 139 was his highest score for eight weeks but he bested that with a century versus Derbyshire to bring him into the weekly top five for the first time in 2019. He is now 19th overall. Joe Burns is another player who has performed well this week with a fifth placed finish. In an alternative reality he would have been scoring truckloads for Lancashire in preparation for the Ashes series, however a prolonged absence of seven weeks due to a fatigue based virus sees the Queensland player rock bottom of the table. His first game back saw him bag a century and fifth spot for the week, as he represented his country's A side in a game against Sussex. He is a cert for the Australia squad and to escape out of the bottom third. The last player who has seen good returns over the last few weeks is Leicestershire's Mohammad Abbas. After winning Cricketer of the Week two weeks ago, he has finished just outside the top five this week. Abbas' position near the foot of the table is largely due to a prolonged spell training with the Pakistan World Cup squad despite Mickey Arthur knowing he was not going to select him. Since he joined up with Leicestershire, he has scored triple figures in terms of points in four of the seven gameweeks he has featured in and boosted his overall position in the table from 22nd to 18th. As our World Cup performers get their well earned rest from the game, these players could keep up their impetus and force themselves into the top ten if they continue their form of this week. 

Gracious me! What a surprise! A big game and Virat Kohli goes missing. One of the most regular criticisms of the Indian captain is that he does not have the nerve for the big event. We have seen this time and time again for Bangalore in the IPL and we saw it this week in the World Cup. His score of 1 is, by far, his lowest tally of points this year. If you couple this with the exact same score for Rohit you can see that India were on a hiding to nothing....or a hiding to two. Next week we will analyse the World Cup players and see who made the most and least impact - at the start of the tournament Kohli's name would have been top of your prediction list but his performance against New Zealand was yet another underwhelming performance for him. If you compare this to his opposing captain, it makes even poorer reading for an Indian fan. Despite neither of the two men scoring immense amounts of runs across the competition, Williamson has outperformed Kohli in terms of points scored in four of the six weeks of the World Cup. A lot of criticism is being aimed at Kohli in terms of his captaincy but his harshest critic is likely to be himself....or some of the companies that he endorses....but probably more himself. 

Week

Simon Harmer - 263
Jack Leach - 251
Jeetan Patel - 224
Callum Ferguson - 200
Joe Burns - 173
Mohammad Abbas - 151
Morne Morkel - 123
Kane Williamson - 107
Shreyas Iyer - 97
Joe Root - 79
Duanne Olivier - 78
Jonny Bairstow - 44
Glenn Maxwell - 32 
Virat Kohli - 21
Jos Buttler - 20
Ben Stokes - 10
Shubman Gill - 10
Rohit Sharma - 1

Shakib Al Hasan - dnp 
Shai Hope - dnp 
Rashid Khan - dnp 
Wayne Parnell - dnp 
Abdur Razzak - dnp 
Kuldeep Yadav- dnp 

Overall 

Glenn Maxwell - 3805
Jeetan Patel - 3339
Simon Harmer - 3223
Joe Root- 3074
Shakib Al Hasan - 2990
Jonny Bairstow - 2919
Ben Stokes - 2683
Rohit Sharma - 2598
Virat Kohli- 2587
Rashid Khan - 2504
Kane Williamson - 2374
Jos Buttler - 2370
Duanne Olivier - 2082
Shreyas Iyer - 1984
Morne Morkel - 1973
Shai Hope - 1861
Wayne Parnell - 1753
Mohammad Abbas - 1571
Callum Ferguson - 1419
Kuldeep Yadav - 1402
Jack Leach - 1370
Shubman Gill - 1049
Abdur Razzak- 898
Joe Burns - 882

Rohit Sharma - The Best Cricketer of the Week

Rohit Sharma has hit three centuries in a calendar week. Let's just stop and marvel at that. The century. The focus and goal for every batsmen. That rare of things. And he just goes ahead and helps himself to three in a week. It will come as little surprise to you that Rohit Sharma is our Cricketer of the Week for his 309 runs against England, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This haul of centuries managed to see The Hitman break Kumar Sangakkara's record of 4 centuries in a World Cup tournament as he takes his tally up to five. Rohit has used the World Cup to help himself surge up the table. At the start of the tournament, Rohit was a long way of the pace in a distant 12th with just 1631 points. This marked a massive fall from grace since his three week spell in the overall top 5 in February. Throughout the group stages, Rohit has accrued 966 points in his nine games and has moved up into eighth place. With another two games potentially in the pipeline it would be a tall order for Sharma to overhaul the 278 points keeping him out of the top 5 but lest we forget; three centuries in a week. Who can dictate what is possible in that kind of form?

With the group stages of the World Cup done and dusted, three of the twelve World Cup players in our overall list have been eliminated with the further nine representing India, England or New Zealand. The three players to who we bid adieu have all had very different World Cup experiences. The foremost loss to the tournament is Bangladesh's Shakib Al Hasan who has used 2019 as his yo-yo. After being our best Cricketer in the world for the first 6 weeks, his stock fell dramatically so that by the time the first game of the World Cup started he was in a lowly 11th position with 1704 points. Fast forward 8 games and Shakib is the third highest run scorer in the tournament with 606 - and this is missing a game due to injury. This has seen Shakib back in the top 5 again after improving his overall score for the year by a stonking 1286 points - this is more than Callum Ferguson has scored in the year as a whole. He will be a huge loss to the tournament. The second player we are saying goodbye to will not be missed as it seems like he never really turned up. I have written a few times this year how Rashid Khan's figures are way down on what they were last year in all formats of the game. This has been highlighted by his lack of potency in this tournament. Afghanistan have been poor and, despite pushing some teams close, are deserved wooden spoon holders. One thing that the Afghanistan team rely on is bags of wickets from their mystery spinner, however his best figures for the tournament were his 2/17 against Sri Lanka. He finishes the World Cup with just six wickets - the same as similarly under achieving Kuldeep Yadav. This poor for, has seen Rashid pull off a 'reverse Shakib'. He started the tournament in second with 2109 but has gained only 395 points in his nine games - a third of what Shakib managed. He is now only just clinging on to his place in the top ten with the still active duo of Jos Buttler and Kane Williamson breathing down his neck. Somewhere in the middle of these two players sits Shai Hope who has blown hot and cold in this tournament. The young West Indian has scored big but slow and has been forced into playing the anchor man to often after his big hitting colleagues have hit out. His stock has risen in this tournament but his place in the overall table hasn't. He finishes in 15th - only one place higher than he started but has 695 extra points. These players will have something of a break from tournament cricket for a while until the CPL kicks off - a tournament I see them all competing in. Internationally, Hope has a home series against India but Afghanistan and Bangladesh have nothing lined up until November. With this period of inactivity on the horizon it could be all change again. 

Is there justice in this world? If you are Simon Harmer possibly not. The Essex man's figures with the ball this week were simply extraordinary. The big scoring South African has been taking bags and bags of wickets again this year and has muscled his way back into the top five ready for a Summer push to regain his top spot position from Glenn Maxwell. This week his figures of 1/42 and 4/35 against Nottinghamshire look unspectacular but if you scrape the surface - or click on the scorecard - you see a whole different picture. In Nottinghamshire's second dig, Harmer bowled 40 overs, 24 of which were maidens. Of those other 16 overs Harmer only leaked 35 runs leaving him with an economy of 0.87. An economy that low is phenomenal - however he still only gets the thirty points for having an economy rate under four. The same points as Morne Morkel got for his 3.66 off 21 overs against Yorkshire. The same points as Jeetan Patel got for his 1-135 in 43.1 overs against Kent. We abolished the rule of awarding 5 points for a maiden last year as it doubly rewarded bowlers and with this rule in place Harmer would have got a further 120 points - I'm not sure if anyone would begrudge him that. As it stands his 200 points sees him finish fourth for the week but, due to the Shakib effect, he moves down in the overall table into fifth position. Even more galling for some once in a lifetime figures. 

Week

Rohit Sharma - 467
Jonny Bairstow-317
Shakib Al Hasan - 260
Simon Harmer - 200
Virat Kohli- 186
Ben Stokes - 180
Jack Leach - 175
Duanne Olivier - 152
Morne Morkel - 140
Callum Ferguson - 139
Shakib Al Hasan - 122
Jos Buttler - 121
Joe Root - 118 
Jeetan Patel - 99
Kuldeep Yadav - 50 
Rashid Khan - 49
Kane Williamson - 47
Glenn Maxwell - 33

Mohammad Abbas - dnp 
Joe Burns - dnp 
Shubman Gill - dnp 
Shreyas Iyer - dnp 
Wayne Parnell - dnp 
Abdur Razzak - dnp 

Overall 

Glenn Maxwell - 3773
Jeetan Patel - 3115
Joe Root- 2995
Shakib Al Hasan - 2990
Simon Harmer - 2960
Jonny Bairstow - 2875
Ben Stokes - 2673
Rohit Sharma - 2597
Virat Kohli- 2566
Rashid Khan - 2504
Jos Buttler - 2350
Kane Williamson - 2267
Duanne Olivier - 2004
Shreyas Iyer - 1887
Shai Hope - 1861
Morne Morkel - 1850
Wayne Parnell - 1753
Mohammad Abbas - 1420
Kuldeep Yadav - 1402
Callum Ferguson - 1219
Jack Leach - 1119
Shubman Gill - 1039
Abdur Razzak- 898
Joe Burns - 709