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
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