Duanne Olivier - The Best Cricketer of the Week

I must have some kind of special power that I was not aware of. The number of times I have highlighted a player's lack of form one Week only for them to blow everyone out of the water the very next week is quite phenomenal. Three weeks ago it was Shubman Gill. This week it was Duanne Olivier. After writing him off as an embarrassment to Yorkshire and bowlers all around the world, he re-entered the County Championship fray and bagged six wickets coupled with maximum economy points to finish as the Best Cricketer of the Week for the second time - after being our inaugural pick at the start of the year when he was playing against Pakistan for South Africa. The return to longer form cricket has clearly appealed to Olivier and a number of our County Championship bowlers would have been salivating at the chance to do some damage with the red ball however, Olivier aside, the bowlers that we expect prolific yields from have disappointed. If you remove Olivier's six wickets, the next highest wicket taker from our list is another surprise, in the form of fellow Kolpak player Wayne Parnell. More used as a T20 bowler, Parnell seized three wickets against Northamptonshire, forced his way into third place for the week and overtook Jos Buttler to move into 11th position. Apart from those two South Africans, the pickings were slim. Our perennial high fliers, Jeetan Patel and Simon Harmer, got 2 and 0 wickets respectively whilst Morne Morkel and Mohammad Abbas both disappointed with 1 wicket. In a week where Sam Billings offered a fairly robust criticism of County Championship scheduling, citing the expectation that a player can move from one form to another seamlessly, it seems that our red ball specialists are struggling to return to their favoured format. 

Some summaries of last week's best Cricketers age rather better than others. There can be times when you are writing about a game that happened a full week ago and you can be aware of an ongoing game which has drastically changed a player or a team's outlook. This is very much the case with England this week. As I write, England are in the middle of a desperately disappointing Test which has seen them capitulate The Ashes series to our cousins on the underside of the world. Newspapers, the media and Twitter have been moribund regarding the team's performances. However cricket is a game that can turn on it's head in an instant and at the end of the second Test things were looking a little brighter. This can be seen in the weekly totals whereby three English players make up the top six. It seems fairly galling to say that now but their achievements need to be memorialised in the same way as someone who had a very good plan to escape the eruption of Pompeii was memorialised by the preservative effects of the lava. The best preserved corpse of an England player is Ben Stokes who finishes in second position this week and becomes the latest player to take the overall fifth spot. This position has been passed around like herpes at a festival. Stokes was in possession of fifth place for two weeks in April but since then Shreyas Iyer, Jeetan Patel, Joe Root, Virat Kohli, Simon Harmer (1 week), Rashid Khan (3 week), Jonny Bairstow and Shakib Al Hasan (5 weeks). Whereas the top 4 have remained comparatively stable it really is 5th place that we are seeing the most movement. With Ben Stokes having a mere 38 point lead off Bairstow and 72 points off Kohli, my expectations are that further shifting and sorting is going to occur. 

And let's finish on a contentious issue. Our overall list, by and large, represents the form of the Cricketers over the calendar year but another poor score for Kane Williamson this week has seen the New Zealand captain sink to his lowest position of 14th. This is a man who got his team to a World Cup final and is one of the premier batsmen of his generation however he has never ever won the Cricketer of the Week award and finished in 9th place overall last year. So why is Williamson always the bridesmaid and never the bride. There are many potential examples for the disappointing yield for the Kiwi. One is the fact that New Zealand just do not play the same amount of international fixtures as other nations. Kohli and Smith - both riding high in fourth and seventh - are never more than a handful of weeks away from their next international foray. In 2018, Williamson barely featured for New Zealand and instead had to rely on Hyderabad and Yorkshire for his points. Another potential reason is the strike rate of his batting. Williamson is very much made in the traditional mould of batsmen and wouldn't have looked out of place in a Test side of yesteryear. He will very rarely get above 60 in terms of his strike rate in Tests and will also be the calm methodical anchor in most ODIs - something we saw reflected in his World Cup performances this year. This means he will be turning down somewhere between 10 and 30 points in a two thirds of his games. When you are already disadvantaged by the number of games you are playing it all all adds up. Without a shadow of a doubt Williamson is a legend of the New Zealand cricket, but does not appear to be a legend of our game. 

Week

Duanne Olivier - 228
Ben Stokes - 198 
Wayne Parnell - 167
Jack Leach - 166
Simon Harmer - 145
Jonny Bairstow - 142
Jeetan Patel - 123
Kuldeep Yadav - 110
Rohit Sharma - 88
Morne Morkel - 70
Jos Buttler - 63
Glenn Maxwell - 51
Mohammad Abbas - 50
Kane Williamson - 44
Joe Root - 24
Callum Ferguson - 11
Shubman Gill - 6

Shakib Al Hasan - dnp 
Joe Burns - dnp 
Shai Hope - dnp 
Shreyas Iyer - dnp 
Rashid Khan - dnp 
Virat Kohli - dnp 
Abdur Razzak - dnp 

Overall 

Glenn Maxwell - 4629
Jeetan Patel - 3825
Simon Harmer - 3799
Joe Root- 3333
Ben Stokes - 3209
Jonny Bairstow - 3171
Virat Kohli- 3137
Shakib Al Hasan - 2990
Rohit Sharma - 2853
Rashid Khan - 2835
Wayne Parnell - 2618
Jos Buttler - 2565
Duanne Olivier - 2534
Kane Williamson - 2458
Shreyas Iyer - 2370
Morne Morkel - 2172
Shai Hope - 1890
Jack Leach - 1849
Callum Ferguson - 1790
Mohammad Abbas - 1705
Shubman Gill - 1687
Kuldeep Yadav - 1562
Joe Burns - 928
Abdur Razzak- 898