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