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
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