Steve Smith - The Best Cricketer of the Week

The inaugural Cricketer of the Week accolade for Steven Peter Devereux Smith comes in Week 106 of these posts. Smith was selected in 2018 but active for just eight of those before the Sandpaper incident and a spell away from the game. 2019 saw him not selected however an historic Ashes performance sees him back for 2020 and the Australian player will want to prove the faith that the selectors have shown in him. In the first three weeks of the year he has been outside the top ten however in a week where he played three fixtures 6329 miles apart he bagged a century for Australia in Bengaluru and then nabbed a half century in the BBL for the Sydney Sixers. This has seen the ex-Australia captain leap six places in the overall List, the most for any player this week, and take fourth position - his highest ever placing. He also becomes the third Australian in a row to get the best Cricketer of the Week after Marnus Labuschagne's victory a fortnight ago and Travis Head's BBL inspired performance seven days ago. As Steve Smith starts to regain his mastery with the bat he is also rehabilitating his reputation in both international and domestic cricket. A season like last year's will see his position within the top ten assured - but does he dare to dream of a top 5 finish?

It's been a bit of a topsy turvy series between South Africa and England. Both team's have oscillated between looking pathetic and impressive in equal measure. Player's performances as well as captaincy decisions have been variable at best. Two players that best exemplify this are England captain Joe Root and South African spinner Keshav Maharaj. Both these players have had good weeks - but with the opposite discipline that you would expect them to showcase their talents in. Joe Root finished just outside the top five for the week and moved from joint 12th place to 9th in the overall list thanks to 197 points in the Third Test. Root is England's tenth highest all-time Test run scorer but only 13.7% of his points this week came from the bat. He is also a canny fielder but an even smaller amount - 5% - came from his prowess in the slips. Instead it was his 4-87 where the lion's share of his points came - 67.51% to be precise. In stark contrast we see a South African player selected for his skills with the ball who went on to excel with the bat. Keshav Maharaj's average sat at 12.17 before the second innings in Port Elizabeth. He then got 71 to make England work for their victory. Again this boosted the Durban born player's total for the considerably. Whilst the share of points is not as stark thanks to a five-fer earlier in the match, 27.20% of his points coming from the bat is not a bad day out for the tailender and helped him move up four places into eleventh and finish second overall for the week. Could these players turn into formidable allrounders? It seems unlikely as both performances were forced out of them by circumstance, however it is a very good string to have in your bow when the chips are down.

There have been some good times for Ben Stokes in the first 25 days of 2020. There were of course very many good days for the England all-rounder in 2019 too - however he has hit the ground running this year to a much greater extent than he did last year. Stokes made hay while the sun shone in the high to late months of Summer but was already quite far behind the chasing pack. This year he has begun strongly. Thanks to the nature of a Test match series he has been inactive every other week but debuted in Week 2 in second place overall, dropped to fifth in his active third week and has then fought back up to second spot with 210 points from the Third Test. This takes his total for 2020 to 589 - at the corresponding time in 2019 he was lagging behind with a mere 166. This is largely down to the vagaries of the cricketing calendar. This year he has played two Tests whilst in 2019 he had played two warm up games against a West Indies' President's XI - however in neither of those matches did he score the same amount of points that he has managed against a full strength South African team. If Stokes can keep up his late 2019 and early 2020 form throughout the year he will be hard to elbow out of the top five.

Week

Steve Smith- 316
Keshav Maharaj- 261
Mohammad Nabi- 233
Ben Stokes - 210
Virat Kohli - 204
Joe Root - 197
Aaron Finch- 188
Rohit Sharma - 176
Peter Handscomb - 172
Marnus Labuschagne- 141
Babar Azam - 116
Glenn Maxwell - 82
Martin Guptill- 70
Travis Head - 70
Shubman Gill - 30
David Warner - 3

Kyle Abbot - dnp
Colin Ackermann- dnp
Tom Banton - dnp
Lewis Gregory - dnp
Simon Harmer - dnp
Jason Holder - dnp

Overall

Marnus Labuschagne - 601
Ben Stokes - 589
Glenn Maxwell - 565
Steve Smith - 547
Martin Guptill - 510
Mohammad Nabi - 502
Virat Kohli - 474
Aaron Finch - 455
Joe Root - 405
David Warner - 392
Keshav Maharaj - 387
Travis Head - 319
Tom Banton - 263
Rohit Sharma - 238
Peter Handscomb - 209
Lewis Gregory - 206
Shubman Gill - 191
Babar Azam - 116