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