Not much cricket played this week.....and even less of it in the coming months. As the world of cricket is threatened with total blackout, two players moved their way up the list. The one who did so from the lowliest position was Jason Holder who began the week at the bottom of the list and was 158 points away from Peter Handscomb. He used a return to domestic cricket and a game for Barbados against Guyana as a way of revolutionising his year.....just before it took a long sabbatical. At the start of the week the West Indies Championship was one of a mere handful of competitions who were still in business and mid way through this game it was announced that after this round of fixtures the season would grind to a halt. Holder's Barbados team are already likely winners of the season but his return to the side and haul of five wickets and 33 runs gave him 223 points for the week. Such has been the poor form for the West Indian captain, that these 223 points reflected just two points fewer than he has got in the year so far. One thing that has been holding Holder back is a lack of cricket - something that he is going to have to get used to going forward. He has played just 5 fifty over games this year, two against a Sri Lanka composite teams and a further three ODIs against Sri Lanka. However he underperformed in all of these with his best performance coming in the final ODI where he got 2-68 and 8 runs. The fact that he clawed himself off rock bottom and gained his first Cricketer of the Week was a pleasing end to this chapter of the year.
The PSL was the only competition that nailed it's colours to the mast this time last week and stated that it was going to soldier on. And it did so.....for a bit. It was devoid of a majority of its foreign talent as the likes of Tom Banton and Lewis Gregory returned home before it was finally put out of its misery mid way through the week. It did allow time for Babar Azam to put on two more average looking performances and continue his ascent up the table. The Pakistan limited overs captain has made progress in five of the last six weeks and and gone from 18th place at the start of the PSL to split the difference and finish the competition in ninth place - overtaking David Warner with scores of 19 and 32 in the dying embers of the competition. Without blowing the competition away, Azam ends up as the top run scorer in the PSL and has the highest average of 52.16. He will be a very intimidating prospect when (or if) the T20 World Cup roles around. For now, however, he will keep his low top ten position until cricket is resumed.
The world has been rocked by the Coronavirus pandemic and to focus on the world of sports seems myopic and rather selfish. For many of us sport is the ever present thread that runs through our lives. The narratives, the speculation, the anticipation and the grandeur of sport is the focus for the way many of us live our lives. Yes, there are larger things and that is the case now more than ever; however for many of us it is a bitter blow that now, in our hour of need, we have also been stripped of one of the core facets of what makes us us. To quarrel or gripe about when Cricket returns is natural but also pointlessly unhelpful. It will return when it can. It knows it is needed and will return when it can in some form. There are swirling vespers of rumours that the IPL may still go ahead in some form - however these were wafted away by the announcement by the ECB that there would be no cricket in England until the 28th of May. Just like the rest of what we have taken for granted for so long, when cricket will return it will not be in the form we expected. But we will be here waiting for it and we will count points once more. Until then we must stay safe, be kind and look after each other.
Week
Jason Holder - 223
Babar Azam - 71
Kyle Abbott - dnp
Colin Ackermann - dnp
Tom Banton - dnp
Aaron Finch - dnp
Shubman Gill - dnp
Lewis Gregory - dnp
Martin Guptill- dnp
Peter Handscomb - dnp
Simon Harmer - dnp
Virat Kohli- dnp
Marnus Labuschagne- dnp
Keshav Maharaj- dnp
Glenn Maxwell - dnp
Mohammad Nabi- dnp
Joe Root- dnp
Rohit Sharma- dnp
Steve Smith - dnp
Ben Stokes - dnp
David Warner - dnp
Overall
Martin Guptill - 1243
Keshav Maharaj - 1176
Ben Stokes - 1128
Joe Root - 1109
Steve Smith - 1109
Marnus Labuschagne - 1000
Aaron Finch - 980
Travis Head - 901
Babar Azam - 874
David Warner - 821
Virat Kohli - 787
Lewis Gregory - 759
Shubman Gill - 752
Mohammad Nabi - 701
Glenn Maxwell - 650
Tom Banton - 603
Rohit Sharma - 471
Jason Holder- 448
Peter Handscomb - 383
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