Martin Guptill is an unlikely star man for the first week of 2020. Picked in this list specifically because he has gone unselected in the major tournaments of the year - he has done just what you would expect of him in a third tier T20 competition and utterly dominated with the bat. He is now the captain of Auckland and played a captain's innings on New Year's Day with a score of 83* against Canterbury before following this up yesterday with 22 against Central Districts - both achieved with strike rates in the 100s. Guptill will not play as much in 2020 as he did in 2019 and he is nowhere near the talismanic player he was in his heyday - about 2015 - but at just over 33 he is nowhere near the scrap heap just yet. What can be guaranteed is that when he does play he will score big against unrecognised bowlers at an impressive strike rate. It is a formula that we have seen before. The fact that Guptill is at something of a loose end throughout the IPL and The Hundred may work to his advantage on our list. If one of your overseas players gets injured, Marty will be on the end of the phone. Until then he will be eyeing up T10 leagues and second and third tier T20 competitions such as the MSL, the Global T20 Canada completion and the much anticipated Euro T20 Slam. Are these halcyon days for Guptill? No. Might they be profitable days? Very possibly.
Another player who will play an awful lot of franchise cricket in 2020 is Mohammad Nabi. He debuts in our overall list in third position and will cover a lot of ground, use a lot of air miles and may very well rack up a fair few wickets and runs in 2020. Currently plying his trade for Rangpur in the BPL, the Afghanistan all rounder started his year with a wicket from each of his two games this week as well as modest scores of 5 and 23 with the bat. Nabi too has something Guptillian about him. This is exemplified by his last game of the week against Sylhet. The eastern Bangladesh franchise are bottom of the table with Nabi's Rangpur just a single place above them so Nabi will be disappointed with scoring just 23 runs off them - however he did so at a strike rate of 135.29, enough to score him the extra twenty points to see him overtake his team mate Lewis Gregory and take third place for the week. There is a slight long term issue for Nabi. Whilst Guptill is likely to feature for his national team in ODIs and T20s fairly soon - Afghanistan do not have any fixtures in the diary yet until the T20 World Cup until October! Although this is obviously not going to remain the case, there are no national games on the horizon for the number one ranked T20I and number two ODI all-rounder. He really will need to fill his boots in those franchise competitions.
You can't keep him away from the top of our Overall List. This is the first week since late February 2019 that Glenn Maxwell has not been in the box seat of our rankings - but he is not too far off the pace. His Nelson score this week sees him 54 points below Guptill and primed for another move up the table as the Big Bash rumbles on for another thousand games. His two performances for the Melbourne Stars this week underline what he brings to the table in these rankings. In the first game he was the effective bowler. The wickets of Alex Hales and Usman Khawaja are prime scalps for any established bowler...but The Big Show got 'em within his first two overs. He is proving a very effective surprise opening bowler - something we saw with Lancashire in the Royal London One Day Cup last year. Then came his second game - the Derby against the Melbourne Renegades. Here he was the batsmen extraordinaire with 40 off 32 balls to arrest a bit of a slide for his team and take them to a fifth win of the season and keep them at the top of the table. This form could see him start 2020 as he ended 2019. The dominant Cricketer in the world.
Week
Martin Guptill - 165
Glenn Maxwell - 111
Mohammad Nabi - 98
Lewis Gregory - 75
Aaron Finch - 64
Peter Handscomb - 34
Tom Banton - 15
Kyle Abbott - dnp
Colin Ackerman- dnp
Babar Azam - dnp
Simon Harmer - dnp
Travis Head - dnp
Jason Holder - dnp
Virat Kohli - dnp
Marnus Labuschagne - dnp
Keshav Maharaj - dnp
Joe Root - dnp
Rohit Sharma- dnp
Steve Smith - dnp
Ben Stokes- dnp
David Warner - dnp
Overall
Martin Guptill - 165
Glenn Maxwell - 111
Mohammad Nabi - 98
Lewis Gregory - 75
Aaron Finch - 64
Peter Handscomb - 34
Tom Banton - 15
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