The Cricket List Top 10 of 2019

For the last year we have been monitoring the top 24 Cricketers in the world; but who has finished top of The Cricket List?

    10. Jonny Bairstow

Total points: 3836

Gap from next position: 40

Number of Cricketer of the Weeks awarded: 1

Highest Scoring Week: 318 in Week 8 – 178 runs in three games for Hyderabad in the IPL set the Yorkshireman on a course to finish 10^th in the overall highest run scorers – despite withdrawing two games early.

Summary: A strong IPL and a World Cup medal will be solace for Jonny Bairstow as his form for England has largely been disappointing. A break from national duty is expected in 2020.

     9. Shakib Al Hasan

Total points: 3862

Gap from next position: 26

Number of Cricketer of the Weeks awarded: 2

Highest Scoring Week: 314 in Week 4 – Runs and wickets in the BPL helped Shakib move into the top spot overall – a place he held for 5 weeks.

Summary: The stink of corruption pollutes Shakib Al Hasan’s inclusion on this list. In fifth place when he was banned for 2 years by the ICC in October, it is lamentable he built up enough of a lead that he did not slip out of the Top Ten for the year.  

       8. Rohit Sharma

Total points: 4308

Gap from next position: 446

Number of Cricketer of the Weeks awarded: 4

Highest Scoring Week: 469 in Week 27 – The highest weekly score of the year went to Rohit’s week of three Word Cup centuries where he got three figures against England, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Summary: One of the few Indian players to have escaped the World Cup with their reputations improved, Rohit Sharma boosted his overall total by 967 during the tournament.

      7. Ben Stokes

Total points: 4410

Gap from next position: 102

Number of Cricketer of the Weeks awarded: 3

Highest Scoring Week: 359 in Week 5 – No it’s not the week you thought it was. Stokes’ pinnacle in 2019 came long before the World Cup final and even longer before Headingley. Stokes was one of the only saving graces in England’s tour of West Indies and this week his performance with the ball gave him his inaugural Cricketer of the Week accolade.  

Summary: One of the true stars of World sport in 2019, Stokes falls just outside the top 5 in our List. His number of inactive weeks across the year has held him back but it will be an unforgettable year for the Durham man.

      6. Rashid Kahn

Total points: 4475

Gap from next position: 65

Number of Cricketer of the Weeks awarded: 3

Highest Scoring Week: 465 in Week 37 – Perhaps fittingly, Rashid saved his best week for his beloved Afghanistan’s Test win against Bangladesh. A performance that has almost been forgotten, Rashid got 75 runs and 10 wickets in a show of all round dominance.

Summary: Down from second last year and nearly two thousand points worse off, Rashid’s year has been worse than 2018 however lingers spectre-like just outside the top 5. He saved some of his best performances for the national team that idolises him so. 

       5. Joe Root

Total points: 4542

Gap from next position: 67

Number of Cricketer of the Weeks awarded: 2

Highest Scoring Week: 362 in Week 8 – Strangely his highest score of the year came in a week where Shreyas Iyer won Cricketer of the Week but 138 runs in two ODIs against the West Indies saw his zenith in 2019.

Summary: An improvement of five places from the 2018 List plus the World Cup under his belt represents a pretty good year for Joe Root. Criticism swirls but the England man’s form has improved.

       4. Virat Kohli

Total points: 4554

Gap from next position: 2

Number of Cricketer of the Weeks awarded: 3

Highest Scoring Week: 374 in Week 33 – Kohli has a penchant for scoring ridiculous amounts of runs against West Indies and did so this week. His back to back centuries forced him into the top 5 for the first time in the year.  

Summary: Consecutive years at Number 4 in The Cricket List shows the consistency of the India captain. A rather disappointing World Cup was bolstered by strong performances against the West Indies helped bolster his overall position.  

       3. Jeetan Patel

Total points: 4843

Gap from next position: 289

Number of Cricketer of the Weeks awarded: 2

Highest Scoring Week: 373 in Week 23 – June was a phenomenal month for Patel culminating in the veteran Warwickshire captain getting match figures of 10/88 against Nottinghamshire.

Summary: Age does not weary Jeetan Patel as he finishes in third position for the second year in a row. The veteran New Zealander got 64 County Championship wickets this year – the third most in the division.

       2. Simon Harmer

Total points: 5115

Gap from next position: 272

Number of Cricketer of the Weeks awarded: 8

Highest Scoring Week: 428 in Week 39 – The last of his Cricketer of the Week accolades and probably one of the biggest days of his cricketing career. The week started with two Man of the Match performances in the T20 Blast finals and ended with the successful defence of the County Championship trophy.

Summary: Down one position from last year, it has nonetheless been a phenomenal year for the South African. Firmly cemented as an Essex legend, he ends the year with the most Cricketer of the Week wins for the second year in a row.

1.    1.  Glenn Maxwell

Total points: 6010

Gap from next position: 895

Number of Cricketer of the Weeks awarded: 5

Highest Scoring Week: 402 in Week 16 – His fourth Cricketer of the Week award came through three Royal London One Day Cup games in a week. His highlight was his career best bowling figure of 5-40 against Middlesex.

Summary: Top of the weekly list since the end of February, it would have been the greatest injustice if The Big Show did not finish top for the year. A quietly extraordinary year for the Australian.  

Rashid Khan - The Best Cricketer of the Week

In order to succeed in our list you need to run like a train; regular, persistent and accurate. Last year Rashid Khan was working like a train that Mussolini would have been proud of. Five Cricketer of the Week awards were spread throughout the year as the Afghanistani sensation travelled the world dazzling his opponents. This year Rashid's gravy train has rather dried up. This week has seen a revival back to something like his best form however it is too little and too late to call this anything close to a success but it does lend us a glimpse of what used to be. This is most evident in his second to last game of the season where he excelled with bat and ball and achieved something that eluded him throughout 2019 - points for his economy. Throughout 2018, Rashid would more often than not couple regular wickets with strangling economy; this has not been the case this year however, raging against the dying of the light, he has shown us a glimpse of what used to be. His 271 points this week makes him one of two players to overtake Rohit Sharma to settle in 6th place for the season - overtaking Stokes in the very last game of the season. When he walked out at number 7 he needed 15 runs to haul Stokes in. He took just nine balls to reach that landmark - eventually out for an eighteen ball 40. As the Rashid express draws out of the station, it is not behind the realms of possibility we may see him in the 2021 list. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

The year has been won by Glenn Maxwell. And nobody would begrudge him the victory. The Australian has been leading our overall List since Week 9 and has done so representing Australia, Lancashire and Melbourne Renegades. For a player to have been so dominant throughout a year without having to resort to hit-and-hope T20 competitions is impressive indeed. His lead of 895 points ahead of Simon Harmer has been hovering over the 1000 point mark since the Summer, however once seemed in threat. When Maxwell announced that he was stepping away from cricket for an indeterminate period of time, his lead on the South African was 738. With the Mzansi Super League about to swing into action, many expected Simon Harmer to be destructive for his Johannesburg outfit much as he was last year. This failed to come to pass as both Harmer and his franchise looked stilted throughout the competition eventually leading to Harmer being dropped from the team that he used to captain. The closest he managed to get to our runaway leader was 597 points just prior to his deselection. When Maxwell returned to his own home T20 competition and The Big Show proved he was still worth the admission fee, it truly was game over. A well deserved winner and another strong contender in 2020 - after all, it is a T20 World Cup year.

Several of our Cricketers have leapt away from their previous position this week as if they were bachelors just before the stroke of midnight, leaping away from their less favoured partners and towards more appealing options before the stroke of midnight. Rashid was just one of six Cricketers to move up the overall list. Most significantly so was Ben Stokes, who yet again was the stand out performer in an under strength England side and managed to accrue 226 points across a warm up game and the first Test against South Africa. Not good enough to lead his team to another miraculous victory but enough to see him overtake Rohit Sharma to take 6th position in his first year on our list. He was not the only Englishman to manoeuvre an Indian out of position just before the final reckoning. Bairstow has had a poor year with only a strong IPL outing being something for the Yorkshireman to hang his hat on. There is a clamour for the Englishman to be given a spell away from the national side - something that was in the offing before the sickness bug debilitated the squad - and his nine runs has not changed many people's minds. It was, however, just enough for him to pip Shreyas Iyer, who himself had a disappointing week comprising of just 7 runs against West Indies. It is not all doom and gloom for our Indian contingent as two of their number also made an upward move this week. Shubman Gill's hundred for Punjab in the Ranji Trophy saw him leap three places and finish 16th in our 24 man list. Kuldeep Yadav's year has been a disappointment and this week is no different. The Indian spinner added just 10 points to his total from the final ODI against the West Indies however this was enough to see him overtake Abdur Razzak and finish 21st for the year. The other mover was Callum Ferguson whose strong second half to the season sees him finish 14th.

Week

Rashid Khan - 351
Ben Stokes - 226
Mohammad Abbas - 190
Glenn Maxwell - 155
Shubman Gill - 140
Jos Buttler - 126
Virat Kohli - 125
Joe Root - 119
Callum Ferguson - 102
Jonny Bairstow - 98
Rohit Sharma - 83
Shai Hope - 72
Joe Burns - 55
Kane Williamson - 19
Kuldeep Yadav - 10
Shreyas Iyer - 7

Shakib Al Hasan - dnp
Simon Harmer - dnp
Jack Leach - dnp
Morne Morkel- dnp
Duanne Olivier - dnp
Wayne Parnell - dnp
Jeetan Patel - dnp
Abdur Razzak- dnp

Overall

Glenn Maxwell - 6010
Simon Harmer - 5115
Jeetan Patel - 4813
Virat Kohli- 4554
Joe Root- 4542
Rashid Khan - 4475
Ben Stokes - 4410
Rohit Sharma - 4308
Shakib Al Hasan -3862
Jonny Bairstow - 3836
Shreyas Iyer - 3796
Jos Buttler - 3245
Duanne Olivier - 3021
Callum Ferguson - 2999
Shai Hope - 2991
Shubman Gill - 2838
Kane Williamson - 2810
Morne Morkel - 2760
Wayne Parnell - 2743
Jack Leach - 2598
Mohammad Abbas - 2339
Kuldeep Yadav - 1930
Abdur Razzak- 1925
Joe Burns - 1750

Shai Hope - The Best Cricketer of the Week

It's a second Cricketer of the Week accolade for Shai Hope this week. It has seemed like a difficult year for the West Indian but he is looking like he might finish in rather a more comfortable position than it might have looked previously. Hope was a player that we expected quite a lot for in the World Cup however he failed to deliver; adding just 695 points despite a very promising looking couple of warm up games against Ireland and Bangladesh that saw him bag his inaugural spot at the top of the weekly List. This week saw two hefty innings from the Barbadian and he also managed to couple it with one score that bothered the strike rate column - long an issue for him. His yield of 260 points has seen him move up the list in something of a prodigious fashion as he overtakes Shubman Gill, Wayne Parnell, Morne Morkel, Callum Ferguson and Kane Williamson to finish the penultimate week of the year in 14th. If looked at purely statistically his year also doesn't look too shabby compared to the rest on our List. He joins the ranks of some fairly illustrious players who have scored Cricketer of the Week twice in 2019 - Rashid Khan, currently 8th overall, Jeetan Patel (3rd) and Joe Root (5th) have also scored a brace over the year. Not bad company to be in. In real world rankings he's deceptively good too. He is sandwiched between fellow List members Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli in second place for overall ODI runs scored. But is that enough to see him feature in our list for 2020?

Two Indian players have made a last push to breech the next stage of the List in the last week. If it was not for Joe Root's 72* for England against a Cricket South Africa Invitation XI, Rohit Sharma would have made his debut in the top five of the overall List for the first time in 2019. What a time to have done that and with what a performance. His stonking score of 159 in the second ODI against the West Indies was slightly let down by his underbaked total in the first match in Chennai allowing Shai Hope to pip him into second for the week. It was still enough for him to overtake the only barely active duo of Ben Stokes and Rashid Khan and drop into sixth position. Probably a bigger achievement is that of Shreyas Iyer. Seven weeks ago Iyer was in 19th position and, like Hope, you would probably have said that his season was underwhelming. However he has had something of a renaissance when he slides on the blue shirt of India and has increased his total by 789 points in the last two months. It is now unthinkable that an ODI team will go forward without Shreyas Iyer holding up the middle order. If he gets 31 runs or more in his next match he will be the quickest player to reach 500 ODI runs for India. A player who can only get better in 2020, one would think.

Kane Williamson. What to do with Kane Williamson? One of the premier batsmen in the world. The captain of New Zealand. A staple of the IPL. The third best Test batsman, the sixth best ODI batsman, the 23rd best T20I batsman. One of the most aesthetically pleasing batsmen to watch. But a damp squib on The Cricket List for two years now. A mere 58 points from his first Test against Australia takes his average for points gained in an active week to 107 from 26 weeks. His total of 2791 from the year is hugely down on his 2018 total of 4251 - a total that was buoyed up by an almost constant inclusion in Yorkshire's County Championship season. This week's meagre total saw him overtake Morne Morkel and Wayne Parnell - and he will be lucky to swell his position any further from his 16th paced spot due to 15th place being occupied by Callum Ferguson who is on fire for the Sydney Thunder in the BBL. So what to do with a problem like Williamson? Our list is supposed to be a list of the very best players in the world but when one of those is marginally better than Morne Morkel, whose form this year has been dubious at best, does he justify his place? It is a genuinely troublesome quandary.

Week

Shai Hope - 260
Rohit Sharma - 255
Shreyas Iyer - 223
Joe Root - 172
Glenn Maxwell - 143
Callum Ferguson - 137
Kuldeep Yadav - 120
Joe Burns - 82
Kane Williamson - 58
Jeetan Patel - 42
Jos Buttler - 35
Virat Kohli - 24
Jonny Bairstow- 13
Shubman Gill - 10
Ben Stokes - 10
Jack Leach - 0
Morne Morkel - 0

Mohammad Abbas - dnp
Shakib Al Hasan - dnp
Simon Harmer - dnp
Rashid Khan - dnp
Duanne Olivier - dnp
Wayne Parnell - dnp
Abdur Razzak - dnp

Overall

Glenn Maxwell - 5855
Simon Harmer - 5115
Jeetan Patel - 4813
Virat Kohli- 4429
Joe Root- 4423
Rohit Sharma - 4225
Ben Stokes - 4184
Rashid Khan - 4124
Shakib Al Hasan -3862
Shreyas Iyer - 3789
Jonny Bairstow - 3738
Jos Buttler - 3119
Duanne Olivier - 3021
Shai Hope - 2919
Callum Ferguson - 2897
Kane Williamson - 2791
Morne Morkel - 2760
Wayne Parnell - 2743
Shubman Gill - 2698
Jack Leach - 2598
Mohammad Abbas - 2149
Abdur Razzak- 1925
Kuldeep Yadav - 1920
Joe Burns - 1695

Virat Kohli - The Best Cricketer of the Week

Kohli is becoming a legend of Indian cricket. On his day nobody can beat the elfin Indian captain - however it is rapidly looking like that he will finish fourth in our list for the second year on the Trott. His 159 points accrued this week from innings of 19 and 70 against his favourite team - the West Indies - has pulled him 185 points away from fifth placed Joe Root. With two weeks left in the year it seems likely that Kohli will get at least fourth placed in the overall List for the year. Root has warm up matches and the first Test against South Africa whilst Kohli has further ODIs against West Indies - his favoured format against his favourite team. So with the chasing pack out of the picture we start to look upwards. Stalwart of our list, Jeetan Patel is a full 370 points ahead of Kohli and has just started his campaign for Wellington in the Super Smash with three wickets and a third place finish for the week. Whilst T20 is not Patel's favoured format, he will play enough games and has enough of a cushion to ensure that he can hold Kohli off. In fact, he is 345 points away from second placed Simon Harmer so it is not out of the question that Harmer, who will now be inactive for the last two weeks, may drop to third. One thing that is becoming increasingly clear is that Glenn Maxwell is very likely to be our star man for 2019.

This year's Cricket List has brought about an abundance of times when our top 5 for the week have featured a plethora of Indian talent. There have only been 20 weeks of the year where an Indian player has not made the weekly top 5 and this week is the sixth occasion where three Indian players feature - as Rohit Sharma and Shubman Gill join Kohli. Rohit bagged another half century in the first T20 against the West Indies and in doing so became the latest player to leapfrog the disgraced Shakib Al Hasan. Sharma is now 8th with Rashid Khan 154 above him. Rashid is about to join up with Adelaide for some T20 action in the BBL so there could still be a bit of a tussle between the two of them to see who can jostle their way to finish just outside the top 5. Further down the list you will find Shubman Gill. A player whose top five aspirations died out many a moon ago. Shubman has been a frustrating prospect this year. When he plays he registers good scores - averaging 96 points across his 28 active weeks. However it is those 22 inactive weeks that really held him back. If he played as many weeks as this week's top Cricketer, Virat Kohli, he would have had 3456, enough to boost his position six places and be just outside the top ten. Instead he has to satisfy himself with overtaking Shai Hope into 18th position. He is undoubtably a decent Cricketer but his position in next year's list is in question thanks to his lack of cricket.

When it is clear that a player won't make the top ten summary on New Year's Eve and may not make the List for the next year, I feel that it is nice to offer something of a cricketing obituary for one of our soon to be departed brethren. Morne Morkel was a debutant to our list this year and is unlikely to feature next year after a disappointing year for Surrey, surprisingly salvaged by a burst of T20 form that helped his Tshwane side reach the final of the MSL. Barely mentioned in these posts for the bulk of the year, I have been forced to dedicate some time to him over the last few weeks due to his spurt up the table. At the start of the MSL, the veteran South African was in 17th; he finishes it in joint 14th and 322 points better off with a game still to play. Short of a legendary performance in the final, Morkel will finish the year as one of four players that did not win Cricketer of the Week in 2019 (alongside Jos Buttler, Jack Leach and Kane Williamson) and will have achieved a fairly nondescript year of cricket. His highest scoring week of 2019 came in Week 23 where he got 252 points through a seven wicket haul against Somerset. I think it very fitting that Surrey did not win that match and he did not feature in the write up for that week. If you do not feature in 2020, goodbye Morne - the invisible man of the 2019 campaign.

Week

Virat Kohli - 159
Rohit Sharma- 146
Jeetan Patel - 120
Shubman Gill - 68
Morne Morkel - 60
Mohammad Abbas - 50
Kuldeep Yadav - 40
Shreyas Iyer - 20
Callum Ferguson - 13

Shakib Al Hassan - dnp
Jonny Bairstow- dnp
Jos Buttler - dnp
Joe Burns - dnp
Simon Harmer - dnp
Shai Hope - dnp
Rashid Khan - dnp
Jack Leach - dnp
Glenn Maxwell - dnp
Duanne Olivier - dnp
Wayne Parnell - dnp
Joe Root - dnp
Abdur Razzak - dnp
Ben Stokes - dnp
Kane Williamson - dnp

Overall

Glenn Maxwell - 5712
Simon Harmer - 5115
Jeetan Patel - 4770
Virat Kohli- 4400
Joe Root- 4215
Ben Stokes - 4174
Rashid Khan - 4124
Rohit Sharma - 3970
Shakib Al Hasan -3862
Jonny Bairstow - 3725
Shreyas Iyer - 3566
Jos Buttler - 3084
Duanne Olivier - 3021
Callum Ferguson - 2760
Morne Morkel - 2760
Wayne Parnell - 2743
Kane Williamson - 2733
Shubman Gill - 2688
Shai Hope - 2659
Jack Leach - 2598
Mohammad Abbas - 2149
Abdur Razzak- 1925
Kuldeep Yadav - 1800
Joe Burns - 1613