Ben Stokes - The Best Cricketer of the Week

Back in the pre-Lockdown era of cricket, it would have been unthinkable for a player to win Cricketer of the Week three times in a row. If it was going to happen, your pre-Lockdown money would have been on Simon Harmer. Such is the relentless march of the County Championship season that it is more likely to string together top drawer performances . Yet in the world we find ourselves in where we have Test match after Test match stretching out ahead of us. In this world, Ben Stokes has had an opportunity of playing with County Championship-style regularity. And my god has he taken advantage. You may say that Stokes has only achieved this because he is the only show in town and there's no one to challenge him for points. This is not the case. The average score for Cricketer of the Week so far in 2020 is 246.85 points - he surpassed that both this week and last. This week he almost doubled it. His 464 points this week is the highest total of 2020 - overtaking Marnus Labuschagne's double ton against New Zealand. In fact you have to go to September of 2019 to see a score even remotely close to Stokes'. Rashid Khan got one more point for his 75 runs and eleven wickets for Afghanistan against Bangladesh. Stokes now has an eye-watering gap on second place - and still had has 4 more Tests to play this Summer. He may be the only show in town - but he's worth the price of admission alone.

The flip side of the Stokes effect is that other players are streaking up the table with below average performances. Jason Holder's form with the bat has been poor for some while but in this Test his bowling seemed awry. His economy rate of 8.25 from the smash and grab second England innings was the highest of any bowler in those 19 overs. Holder is no inexperienced newbie at shorter form cricket. He should know how to bowl in such situations. His weekly total of 117 is boosted by 30 points from catches so even that lowly total flatters to deceive. This being said, Holder has been rewarded by another jump of three places up the list. This time he shoulders Virat Kohli, Lewis Gregory and David Warner out the way to make the top ten for the first time. Quite the escape job from the player who only got off the bottom of the List the week before cricket shut down. Joe Root was also disappointing this week. The last time he played, he bagged Cricketer of the Week for 208 points in a warm-up game against a Sri Lanka Cricket XI. Root always scores in warm up games and then fades away in the real thing. Of the four times that Root has topped the weekly list, only twice has it been in a full England international and only one of those in a Test match. 55 points is the lowest score he has had for an active week in 2020. You have to go back to a warm up game against New Zealand A last year for him to have score any lower. The returning England captain will be hoping for better - especially as he is now just 12 points off third placed Keshav Maharaj.

Babar Azam's men in green are the next opponents looming on the horizon for England. The large squad played a full blooded game in Derbyshire where no one held back. This was characterised by Abid Ali having to be taken to hospital for an MRI scan. One of the more impressive performances came from Babar himself. Despite his Team White losing, he bounced back from a disappointing first innings score of 12 to get 58 in the second dig. He also got 30 economy points for four overs of bowling. A rare sight indeed. Azam's progression up the table has been similar to Holder's. Disappointing in the first third of the year, some decent performances in the PSL took him from being a mid-teen player to outside the top ten. His 130 points this week brings him over the 1000 point mark and into sixth place. In so doing, he overtakes Labuschagne, Aaron Finch and Travis Head. Despite not playing a single ball it has been a bad week for the Australians on our List. Out of the seven players that have moved down, five have been Aussies. With another intra-squad game still in the bank, the England v Pakistan Test series could see all three competing players on our list within the top 5.

Week

Ben Stokes - 464

Babar Azam - 130

Jason Holder - 117

Joe Root- 55 

Kyle Abbott - dnp 

Colin Ackermann - dnp 

Tom Banton - dnp 

Aaron Finch - dnp 

Shubman Gill - 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 

Rohit Sharma- dnp 

Steve Smith - dnp 

David Warner - dnp 

Overall 

Ben Stokes - 2085

Martin Guptill - 1243

Keshav Maharaj - 1176

Joe Root - 1164

Steve Smith - 1109

Babar Azam - 1004

Marnus Labuschagne - 1000

Aaron Finch - 980

Travis Head - 901

Jason Holder- 891

David Warner - 821

Lewis Gregory - 819

Virat Kohli - 787

Shubman Gill - 752

Mohammad Nabi - 701

Glenn Maxwell - 650

Tom Banton - 603

Rohit Sharma - 471

Peter Handscomb - 383

Ben Stokes - The Best Cricketer of the Week

Slaying your enemy has been a feature of society since the dawn of civilisation. Ovid stated that "conquering ...neighbours was your chief occupation." It's easy to transfer that to the tribalism of sport where your myopic occupation is to put your rivals to the sword. The rarest form of success in ancient battle was where one leader would kill the leader of the opposition in hand to hand combat. The first early Roman king to do this was the very earliest Roman king; Romulus. On a whim, Romulus stripped the blood-soaked armour from his foe and took it back to Rome. This became known as the 'Spoils of Honour.' This was a feat only ever achieved rarely. In our particular field of battle, two leaders of men faced off this week with the eyes of the world on them. The fiery red haired leader of the Celts faced up (quite literally) to his giant rival - but it was the latter who was David to Stokes' Goliath. But to whom went the spoils? Well funnily enough - not the victor. This was a personal battle between the two men. It was Holder who first claimed the spoils of war, but, unlike in the field of battle, Stokes had the opportunity of nabbing them back. Inevitably, Holder had his man in the second innings too. Much like the Spoils of Honour, two captains dismissing each other is a rare achievement. This was only the twelfth time two captains have dismissed each other - and only the third time it has happened in the first innings. This duelling aside, the Test had a deja vu feel to it for the England fan. Last February, Stokes was the stand out performer for England in their underwhelming tour of the Caribbean. In this reverse fixture it seem's not a lot has changed. Despite the criticism of his captaincy and selection decisions, his performance was unaffected. He became the second captain in Test history, after Monty Noble and Lala Amarnath, to be the top run scorer and best bowler in the first innings. This has seen the Durham man claim his sixth Cricketer of the Week accolade. He becomes the seventh player to win the Cricketer of the Week award twice in a row - but there wasn't much competition for him to beat off for that title. That being said, nobody has ever done three weeks in a row. If Stokes can keep up this form he could break that record and extend his 378 point lead at the top of the overall table. The first battle has been lost - but will Stokes end with dominion in the war.

The pandemic is going to change our results come the end of the year. One player who could cash in is Jason Holder. In one Test match, the West Indian captain climbed four places on the overall table with his score of 259. This sees him now in 13th place - 13 points behind Virat Kohli. Lucky for some. Holder is the player on our list that has the most guaranteed cricket in his calendar. With two more Test here, he will then go on to captain the Barbados side in the CPL. Holder's 13th place is even more remarkable when you take into consideration that he has only been active for six weeks out of a possible fifteenth. So where could Holder end up this year? To consider that we need to look at those around him as well as what he could achieve. In the two weeks where he has played red ball cricket this year, he has scored 200+ each time. If we then pencil him in for another 400 points before the end of the Test series it would place him second with 1219. And that is we even consider the CPL starting in August. We also need to consider those around him. Are any of those players likely to rise with him? This week he overtook Tom Banton, Glenn Maxwell, Mohammad Nabi and Shubman Gill. Out of that group, only Banton and Nabi have any cricket on their schedule: Banton with England and Nabi alongside Holder with Barbados. Looking above Holder, the only players with confirmed cricket are Lewis Gregory, Babar Azam and, of course, the Test duo of Stokes and Joe Root. In these circumstances, we may need to be considering Holder as a top five player on our overall list very soon. This could be doing the Barbadian a disservice. We have seen over the weekend that, on his day, he may have been good enough to earn that in a regular year. However you play the hand you are dealt - and Holder might just have the most Royal of flushes.

Week

Ben Stokes - 309
Jason Holder - 259

Kyle Abbott - dnp
Colin Ackermann - dnp
Babar Azam - dnp
Tom Banton - dnp
Aaron Finch - dnp
Shubman Gill - 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
David Warner - dnp

Overall

Ben Stokes - 1621
Martin Guptill - 1243
Keshav Maharaj - 1176
Joe Root - 1109
Steve Smith - 1109
Marnus Labuschagne - 1000
Aaron Finch - 980
Travis Head - 901
Babar Azam - 874
David Warner - 821
Lewis Gregory - 819
Virat Kohli - 787
Jason Holder- 774
Shubman Gill - 752
Mohammad Nabi - 701
Glenn Maxwell - 650
Tom Banton - 603
Rohit Sharma - 471
Peter Handscomb - 383

Ben Stokes - The Best Cricketer of the Week

It won't surprise anyone when I state that our List is going to deviate from the norm an awful lot this year. Apart from the fact that players will be able to achieve about half of their usual totals (if they are lucky) we will also see a big team bias. The Big Three dominate cricket- however their dominion doesn't automatically carry over to our list. Whilst Maxwell won last year, Simon Harmer topped our inaugral list whilst the likes of Jeetan Patel, Rashid Khan and Sunil Narine have also been in the mix. In this (only just) post-Covid landscape only the biggest teams and the most financially viable tournaments will be played out. This will put our battling undergoes at the bottom of the pile. In a normal year, our resident South Africans Harmer and Kyle Abbott would have been doing their business in the County Championship. It is still debatable when and if they will get off 0. As if to underline this point, in the second week of cricket since lockdown's easing Ben Stokes moves from third place to first. Stokes was the stand out member for his epnumpus team on the last day of the warm up fixture. He waited to make his impact though, scoring 34% of his match total in an exhibition of 33 from 17 balls in the last hour. To get to the top spot Stokes has overleaped Martin Guptill and Keshav Maharaj. As of now there is no news of any international return for these two, whilst Stokes will be playing six Tests. It is possible that Stokes could be approaching a thousand point lead before any of those play again.

Our list has included three players this week: all three who have moved up at least a place. The least deserving of this is Lewis Gregory who moves back up to eleventh place. By moving up one place he pushes Virat Kohli into twelfth - there's a sentence you wouldn't have predicted at the start of the year. This was going to be the year that made or broke Lewis Gregory. Even pre-pandemic it wasn't going too well for the Somerset all-rounder. He skirted around the average mark during the England Lions tour with his best performance was against a New South Wales XI where he got 55 and two wickets. He then moved on to the PSL where injury and ineffectiveness hampered him. His return saw him bag a duck and no wickets from 11 overs for Team Stokes. Many people would point to the fact that Gregory's natural home was unlikely to be in a Test set up with his natural game better suiting the white ball. Even with that being the case, this week's outing was a poor showing. This match, if not this whole year, will more than likely prove an anomaly however if Gregory is not a busted flush he is a flush that needs some renovation before his name is inked into any England squad.

With Gregory out of the Test squad and Joe Root on parental duties, the England vs West Indies series is now a one-a-side challenge for our List. A straight battle between two allrounder captains. Stokes vs Holder pits two of the most influential players in world cricket against each other, yet it comes at a bad time for Holder. The West Indies captain is coming into the series with a niggling injury that is likely to hamper his performance. Such was the impressiveness of his batting there was talk of Holder moving up the order. This is starkly contrasted to his performance in the second warm up game where he scored seven runs across both innings for his own team. When you add this to to his duck from the first match he averages 2.33 across the (meaningless friendly) tournament. Despite a poor spell with the bat, Holder got a wicket with a low economy to see him reach 67 points for the week. This was enough to see him overtake Rohit Sharma and move into 17th place. Holder is oftentimes the glue that held a fragile West Indies team together. With that glue missing you cannot help but feel that this series may skew towards Stokes' men. On his day, Holder is a better all-rounder than Stokes. Yes, Stokes is having his moment in the sun. If he can extend that moment, he will become a great but Holder has 1898 runs and 106 wickets - painfully close to the 2000 runs and 100 wicket mark. It is a true shame that 2020 will not be brightened by the two men matching up in their best form. But we will all watch nonetheless.

Week

Ben Stokes - 184
Jason Holder - 67
Lewis Gregory - 60

Kyle Abbott - dnp
Colin Ackermann - dnp
Babar Azam - dnp
Tom Banton - dnp
Aaron Finch - dnp
Shubman Gill - 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
David Warner - dnp

Overall

Ben Stokes - 1312
Martin Guptill - 1243
Keshav Maharaj - 1176
Joe Root - 1109
Steve Smith - 1109
Marnus Labuschagne - 1000
Aaron Finch - 980
Travis Head - 901
Babar Azam - 874
David Warner - 821
Lewis Gregory - 819
Virat Kohli - 787
Shubman Gill - 752
Mohammad Nabi - 701
Glenn Maxwell - 650
Tom Banton - 603
Jason Holder- 515
Rohit Sharma - 471
Peter Handscomb - 383