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