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
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