Simon Harmer - The Best Cricketer of the Week

A week that started with two man of the match performances on finals day and ended with his team in possession of the County Championship also sees Simon Harmer claim his second successive Cricketer of the Week award. Harmer has been an instrumental figure for Essex since he joined in 2017 and many thought that his performance in his debut season would not be hard to top, however his 2019 has probably surpassed that. At the start of the year Harmer set out his stall for a total of 80 Championship wickets - 8 more than he got in the title winning season and 23 more than he got last year - he blew this away in the thrilling denouement to the season and reached 83. His form this year has been making people ponder if he is the best overseas signing the County Championship has ever seen. This may be a bit myopic at this moment in time as it is all too easy to live in the moment and forget the Lehmanns, the Mushtaqs and even the Wayne Daniels of this world. One thing that is difficult to argue is that Harmer is one of the best spinners in the World game at this time and Essex should think themselves very fortunate that they are in possession of him. His 428 point week sees him draw away from third place rather dramatically, but also really narrows the gap between himself and first placed Glenn Maxwell. The long time runaway leader is starting to tire now and only has a 203 point jump on Harmer. The difference may be that Maxwell is already embedded in the Marsh One Day Cup whilst Harmer has a month before the start of his next likely outing - the Mzansi Super League.

The trend over the last 21 weeks of this ranking system is that there are early front runners that slip away into comfortable mid table obscurity. Last year it was JP Duminy who was numero uno for the first few months but slipped back to 20th by the end of the year. This year there were two players that made the early running. Shreyas Iyer was the first and he has done the polite thing and slipped away to 14th. The other was Shakib Al Hasan who had an amazing BPL and forced his way into the top spot but then slipped away for eleven weeks and subsequently dropped down the table - but never out of the top ten. Then came the Summer of Shakib, where his World Cup performances were simply majestic and he forced his way back up the table and entered the top five once more. It then seemed all too likely that he would fade away and continue his descent down the table. However like an accountant at a party, he refuses to go away. His output in the T20 tri-series with Afghanistan and Zimbabwe have seen him pick up another 551 points in three weeks. This seems him muscle his way past Virat Kohli and Jonny Bairstow and settle in behind Rashid Khan in seventh spot - the only player to move up the table this week. Forthcoming there is another spell where I don't think the Bangladesh captain will be playing any cricket. He is not playing in the MSL and the next national outing is against India in November but don't put it past him to drift downwards before a quick spurt of activity pushes him back towards the top five again.

I appear to mentioning the word 'drift' rather a lot today, but we are at that point of the year where less cricket is being played and we see some of those players who played well earlier in the year start to fade away. Rohit Sharma is a prime candidate for that. The Hitman was our fourth most prolific player during the World Cup period with 967 points and moving up from twelfth position to eight position - however his yield from there has been weak. Thanks to his non selection for the Tests against the West Indies, he has played just eight games since his 1 against New Zealand in India's final World Cup game. In this time he has had a score of 68 in a warm up game against West Indies A and 67 in a T20 against the full West Indies side, all his other scores are of 25 or less and his average is 26. If you remove his 68 against a relatively weak West Indies A side it is an even worse 17.5. This has seen him drop from eight place back down to tenth. He has been cut a break due to the fact that the chasing pack now have a spell away from the game with Olivier, in eleventh, not playing until the MSL and twelfth placed Jos Buttler not likely to play until England's tour to New Zealand. The problem is that Sharma himself is unlikely to see much time in the middle as India now turn their attention to the Tests versus South Africa. It could be a year of what ifs for the prolific white ball Cricketer

Week

Simon Harmer - 428
Joe Burns - 179
Jack Leach - 171
Shakib Al Hasan - 150
Glenn Maxwell - 125
Wayne Parnell - 124
Mohammad Abbas - 82
Rashid Khan - 61
Callum Ferguson - 45
Jeetan Patel - 30
Virat Kohli - 19
Morne Morkel - 10
Rohit Sharma - 9
Shreyas Iyer - 5
Duanne Olivier - 0

Jonny Bairstow - dnp
Jos Buttler - dnp
Shubman Gill - dnp
Shai Hope - dnp
Abdur Razzak - dnp
Joe Root - dnp
Ben Stokes - dnp
Kane Williamson - dnp
Kuldeep Yadav - dnp

Overall

Glenn Maxwell - 5177
Simon Harmer - 4974
Jeetan Patel - 4385
Joe Root- 3769
Ben Stokes - 3706
Rashid Khan - 3613
Shakib Al Hasan -3541
Virat Kohli- 3494
Jonny Bairstow - 3429
Rohit Sharma - 2874
Duanne Olivier - 2852
Jos Buttler - 2793
Wayne Parnell - 2743
Shreyas Iyer - 2533
Kane Williamson - 2498
Morne Morkel - 2438
Jack Leach - 2378
Shubman Gill - 2102
Shai Hope - 1976
Callum Ferguson - 1835
Mohammad Abbas - 1787
Kuldeep Yadav - 1694
Joe Burns - 1107
Abdur Razzak- 898

Simon Harmer - The Best Cricketer of the Week

You get the feeling that Simon Harmer might just be in the form of his life and at just the right time for his team. There is an early Looney Tunes short called 'Baseball Bugs' where Bugs single handedly defeats the Gas-House Gorrilas. In the course of this game, Bugs plays every position darting from point to point to make up the whole team. At times over the last few weeks it seems that Simon Harmer is doing exactly that. If there's a catch - he's there. If his team need a tidy half century - he steps up. And then there are the wickets. Absolute truck loads of wickets. This week Harmer got 7-58 against Surrey to add to the 6-143 he picked up against Warwickshire last week. This impressive burst of wicket taking pushes him 10 wickets clear of Kyle Abbott for Most wickets in Division One. This will be the third year in succession that the South African has topped that table and you will be hard pushed to argue with his claim that he is one of the best spinners in the world right now. His weekly total of 330 finally puts some daylight between him and Jeetan Patel, with the New Zealand player now 171 points behind. More pertinently the gap between Harmer and first-placed Glenn Maxwell is now only 526. There is still plenty of cricket left in 2019 for the pair of them. Glenn Maxwell will be back playing his trade with Victoria in the One Day Cup whilst Harmer has at least one T20 Blast game, a County Championship game and the Mzansi Super League to play for. It will be an exciting run in.

It has been a very mixed bag for England players and fans throughout this Ashes series. England are the best team in the world. England are crap. England are going to win. England lose. England are going to lose. England win. England lose the Ashes but don't lose. The varying course of this late English summer is also represented in the five England players we have in our list, with two doing well, one doing averagely and two disappointing. The two who have picked up the most points over the course of the two months are Ben Stokes and Jack Leach who added 901 and 524 points to their totals respectively. They also moved up one place in the overall league with Stokes finishing in fifth and Leach in 17th. It is fitting that those two men, so eternally etched on our memories of Headingley, are together here also. One player who was variable at best was captain Joe Root. His total was increased by 595 and his blushes rather spared by his Oval performance over the last week where he picked up 198 points - his biggest total of the series. He retains his fourth spot....just. There are two players who have slid backwards. One is Jos Buttler, who inarguably disappointed throughout the series. Like Root, Buttler saved his (relative) best for last, with his 147 being comfortably double his highest score previously. Buttler only added 317 points to his total and regressed from an already disappointing 11th place to 12th overall. Then comes Jonny Bairstow. The talismanic wicket-keeper-batsman has had a mixed year with his form gradually disintegrating as 2019 went on. He was one of the stand out performers of the IPL, was variable in the World Cup and in the Ashes he was. He did get more points than Buttler by adding 464 to his total but, thanks to the performances of Messrs. Khan, Kohli and Stokes, ends the series three places worse off than he started it he slips to eighth spot.

Sometimes in sport poor performances from the teams or players around you, coupled with a slight increase in your output can see you progress up the table. This is something we have seen from Duanne Olivier in the last two months. After a disappointing first year as a Yorkshire player he has been slightly dialling it up in the last few weeks. His second Cricketer of the Week accolade 4 weeks ago and his six wickets against Kent this week have seen him sneak a surprise charge up the table. This week he is just (and only just, mind) outside the top ten. The reason for this sudden good fortune is two fold. Over the last three months, Olivier has been gradually increasing his output. In July he got his second lowest monthly total with a score of 261 but has increased that month on month with this month's total being 318 with another week to go. The second reason is the sinking feeling some of the players around him have encountered. The players around Olivier at the start of June were Buttler and Kane Williamson just above him and Shreyas Iyer and Shai Hope just below him. Through a combination of poor form, lack of selection or a combination of the two, three of those four players have been stagnant or made negative progress on the overall table, with only Shreyas Iyer getting anywhere close to good progress in that time. With just a 13 point gap between himself and Sharma, a good performance in his final game against Warwickshire may see the South African finish the English Summer in the top ten.

Week

Simon Harmer - 330
Duanne Olivier - 234
Jack Leach - 200
Joe Root - 198
Jeetan Patel - 159
Jos Buttler - 147
Kuldeep Yadav - 132
Rashid Khan - 129
Ben Stokes - 127
Shakib Al Hasan - 125
Virat Kohli- 122
Shubman Gill - 112
Morne Morkel - 92
Jonny Bairstow- 86
Shreyas Iyer - 16
Rohit Sharma - 12

Mohammad Abbas - dnp
Joe Burns - dnp
Callum Ferguson - dnp
Shai Hope - dnp
Glenn Maxwell - dnp
Wayne Parnell - dnp
Abdur Razzak - dnp
Kane Williamson - dnp

Overall

Glenn Maxwell - 5052
Simon Harmer - 4526
Jeetan Patel - 4355
Joe Root- 3769
Ben Stokes - 3706
Rashid Khan - 3552
Virat Kohli- 3475
Jonny Bairstow - 3429
Shakib Al Hasan - 3391
Rohit Sharma - 2865
Duanne Olivier - 2852
Jos Buttler - 2793
Wayne Parnell - 2619
Shreyas Iyer - 2528
Kane Williamson - 2498
Morne Morkel - 2428
Jack Leach - 2207
Shubman Gill - 2102
Shai Hope - 1976
Callum Ferguson - 1790
Mohammad Abbas - 1705
Kuldeep Yadav - 1694
Joe Burns - 928
Abdur Razzak- 898

Rashid Khan - The Best Cricketer of the Week

In cricket there are players who get inextricably linked to the formative years of their nations forays into the sport. For England it was W.G. Grace. For Australia it was Fred Spofforth. For Afghanistan it will be Rashid Khan. This week, in the shadow of The Ashes, Rashid Khan pulled off a simply remarkable performance to lead his team to their second Test win. Rashid Khan is the poster boy of Afghanistan cricket and the fact that his team are the quickest to two Test wins is largely down to his performances, first against Ireland last year and then this week against Bangladesh. Rashid scored points in every category with the exception of fielding thanks to 75 runs off the bat and eleven wickets. For this to come so early in Afghanistan's Test history and against an established and burgeoning Test nation is even more extraordinary. The 465 points that Rashid accrued this week is, by far, his highest total of 2019 and sees him overtake Shakib Al Hasan, Jonny Bairstow and Virat Kohli to move into sixth place on the overall table. As Afghanistan head into a bright cricketing future, it is inevitable that Rashid will be there at the forefront if he saves his best performances for these big moments. 

Rashid Khan's Afghanistan was facing off against one of his closest competitors this week as he shook hands with his fellow captain Shakib Al Hasan. At the start of the week there were just 32 points between 8th placed Shakib and 9th placed Rashid. Clearly the youngster had the better of the match and the individual performances but Shakib did not have too bad a return to the international fray either. With five wickets and 55 runs as well as a strangling economy, Shakib did enough to see himself finish third for the week, however it shows the gulf between him and Rashid that the Afghanistan spinner still had enough to overtake him and two other players despite Shakib's weekly total of 276. Rashid vs Shakib was not the only show in town though. Further up our table we saw two other players going to toe to toe as second placed Simon Harmer and third placed Jeetan Patel met in Birmingham. These two players have been synchronising with each other over the last few months and it seemed like they were determined to do so again this week. Harmer got six wickets. Patel got six wickets. Harmer got 40 points for 4 catches. Patel got 40 points for one catch and his economy. The thing that pushed one of them ahead of the other was runs off the bat. As well as his prowess with the ball, Jeetan Patel has become a doughty tailend batsman and got a half century this week. This saw him do enough to edge ahead in the contest and regain second place overall. He now has a 20 point jump on Harmer with two more fixtures in the County Championship. Patel will hope to extend his lead as much as he can because Harmer will be returning to his native South Africa as soon as things finish up in England to play in the Mzansi Super League. Patel will have to wait a little longer for New Zealand's domestic season to start. Either way I expect the two bowlers to continue to be locked together to the bitter end. 

The weekly top five is rounded off by Morne Morkel. The South African is enjoying a solid if not spectacular year for Surrey and has seen himself floating around the middle of the table all year. In a year where Cricketers of the Week have been handed out with gay abandon, Morkel is probably the most high profile to have never claimed the accolade. In the whole of 2018 we awarded Cricketer of the Week to 17 players meaning that 7 went without the title. With three months left of this year, we have already given it to 18 players. The reasons for some of these are fairly straight forward; they've just had poor years. Bottom of the table Joe Burns and Abdur Razzak have simply not played enough cricket whilst Callum Ferguson (20th) has been inconsistent. Jack Leach has moved up to 18th this week and will probably be involved in England's Winter tours. In my opinion he is the most likely candidate to become the 19th player on our list to finish as top dog. I have spoken before about Kane Williamson and his aversion to finishing at the top of the tree; he is now the only player to have featured in every week since I started this and never won Cricketer of the Week. And then there's Morne Morkel. On his day an explosive bowler but never explosive enough to warrant the top spot. Always the bridesmaid and never the bride. 

Week

Rashid Khan -465
Jeetan Patel - 291
Shakib Al Hasan - 276 
Simon Harmer - 220
Morne Morkel - 164
Glenn Maxwell - 160
Joe Root - 121
Jack Leach - 116 
Shubman Gill - 115
Duanne Olivier - 84
Jos Buttler - 75
Jonny Bairstow - 72
Ben Stokes - 47

Mohammad Abbas - dnp 
Joe Burns - dnp 
Callu, Ferguson - dnp 
Shai Hope - dnp 
Shreyas Iyer - dnp 
Virat Kohli - dnp 
Wayne Parnell - dnp 
Abdur Razzak - dnp 
Rohit Sharma- dnp
Kane Williamson - dnp 
Kuldeep Yadav - dnp 


Overall 

Glenn Maxwell - 5052
Jeetan Patel - 4196
Simon Harmer - 4176
Ben Stokes - 3579
Joe Root- 3571
Rashid Khan - 3423
Virat Kohli- 3353
Jonny Bairstow - 3343
Shakib Al Hasan - 3226
Rohit Sharma - 2853
Jos Buttler - 2646
Wayne Parnell - 2619
Duanne Olivier - 2618
Shreyas Iyer - 2512
Kane Williamson - 2498
Morne Morkel - 2336
Jack Leach - 2007
Shubman Gill - 1990
Shai Hope - 1976
Callum Ferguson - 1790
Mohammad Abbas - 1705
Kuldeep Yadav - 1562
Joe Burns - 928
Abdur Razzak- 898

Shreyas Iyer - The Best Cricketer of the Week

In a week where precious little cricket was played by our contributors, there was one nation that stood head and shoulders over the rest. In our (notional) top 5 this week there is no less than 3 Indian players. Leading the pack this week is a young Indian batsman who is forcing his agenda for selection in all forms of the game through his A team performances. August was a good month for Shreyas Iyer. After having having the good fortune to be left out of India's World Cup run, he benefited from their underwhelming performance to be one of the call ups for the West Indies series and did himself proud. This week he followed that up with his return to A team action where he impressed in two rain affected games against South Africa A to continue his rise up the table. Thanks to a very strong start to the year Iyer's period of inaction over the middle months of the year meant that he never sunk below mid table overall. This week has seen overtake Kane Williamson and move into 14th. The other Indian player to move up the table is a more high profile one. Virat Kohli thrives in matches against the West Indies - and this week was no exception. His score of 76 runs with three catches in the field was enough for him to finish second this week despite the fact he was out for a duck in the second innings. His 126 runs for the week see him overtake Jonny Bairstow and move into sixth. The last name to make up our Indian trio is Shubman Gill. In a normal week a total of 83 would be unlikely to see you finish in the top five and, in truth, Gill would be disappointed to get just 43 runs across three One Day games however there he is bringing up the rear in this Indian summer for Indian cricket.

Perhaps while we are talking all thing Indian we should linger over two Indian players who received zero this week. For the longest period of time Kuldeep Yadav's form for the Indian Test team was the only thing that was keeping his head above water and buoying him up from his year being a total embarrassment. The last couple of weeks have seen this slip away from him. Yadav has now played neither Test against the West Indies and had a disappointing time of it in the ODIs. Stranded, as he is, in the bottom 3 with a 143 point gap between him and Mohammad Abbas, you cannot help but feel that a Ravindra Jadeja style spurt up the table is becoming increasingly unlikely. With the rise of Navdeep Saini and the evergreen Ravi Ashwin (formerly of this parish), Kuldeep must be feeling the pressure for his place in the team. Another, more high profile, omission from these two Test matches is tenth place Rohit Sharma. A strong contributor in the World Cup and a decent warm up game against a West Indies A side did not impress the Indian selectors enough to give him a berth in the first team. With Hanuma Vihari performing so well in his stead, one can't help but wonder if this was the last chance for Sharma to convert his short ball prowess into a Test career. As we approach the last third of the year, we turn our minds to who might be on our list for 2020. Yadav and Sharma are both players who have question marks over their continuation - however with a T20 World Cup Sharma is a more favourable selection than his younger compatriot.

I have questioned Rashid Khan all the way though 2019. He has seemed under baked throughout the year. Whether it be in the IPL or in the T20 Blast, his form is significantly down from 2018 and his World Cup was a disappointment. This being said it has been a long while since Rashid has bowled in Asia and, whenever he joins up with his national side he always gets a boost. If you join this together, we could see a boost up the table. The series kicked off with a four day warm up game against a Bangladesh Cricket Board XI that saw Rashid pick up three wickets and get his highest weekly score for six weeks. We talk about Rashid Khan as if he has been around for ages, however he is still (officially) twenty and we could be in for another decade and a half of the young Afghanistan spinner breaking boundaries, however to do this he will need consistency and flexibility. My biggest fear for Rashid is that he will turn into a second Mustafizur Rahman. The Fizz burst on to the scene with all the pyrotechnics of Rashid and took the world by storm but soon enough his sparkle began to leave him. He is still capable of big performances (see his back to back fivefers in the World Cup) but he is nowhere near the standard he was expected to obtain. This Is down to the fact he was something of a One trick pony and once his action had been spotted he needed to adapt or perish. Rashid needs to learn from this and regularly be hitting his straps and varying his deliveries in order to be as destructive as he was in 2018.

Week

Shreyas Iyer - 142
Virat Kohli - 126
Rashid Khan - 123
Shubman Gill - 83
Glenn Maxwell - 34
Simon Harmer - 20

Mohammad Abbas - dnp
Shakib Al Hasan - dnp
Jonny Bairstow - dnp
Joe Burns - dnp
Jos Buttler - dnp
Callum Ferguson - dnp
Shai Hope - dnp
Jack Leach - dnp
Morne Morkel - dnp
Duanne Olivier - dnp
Wayne Parnell - dnp
Jeetan Patel - dnp
Abdur Razzak - dnp
Joe Root - dnp
Rohit Sharma - dnp
Ben Stokes - dnp
Kane Williamson - dnp
Kuldeep Yadav - dnp

Overall

Glenn Maxwell - 4892
Simon Harmer - 3956
Jeetan Patel - 3905
Ben Stokes - 3532
Joe Root- 3450
Virat Kohli- 3353
Jonny Bairstow - 3271
Shakib Al Hasan - 2990
Rashid Khan - 2958
Rohit Sharma - 2853
Wayne Parnell - 2619
Jos Buttler - 2571
Duanne Olivier - 2534
Shreyas Iyer - 2512
Kane Williamson - 2498
Morne Morkel - 2172
Shai Hope - 1976
Jack Leach - 1891
Shubman Gill - 1875
Callum Ferguson - 1790
Mohammad Abbas - 1705
Kuldeep Yadav - 1562
Joe Burns - 928
Abdur Razzak- 898