Jason Holder - The Best Cricketer of the Week

How fitting it is that the man who had the most to lose in the West Indies' tour of England ends with Cricketer of the Week. Holder did not need to be as receptive as he was to call to arms from his board. A smattering of high profile West Indian names opted out. If he had joined them it would have been a fait accompli for the series and, one feels, for his board. But he made the right choice and has got his reward. His weekly haul of 178 is the 6th lowest since the readjustment of our points system at the start of 2019. Despite this you feel like he was rather due his second Cricketer of the Week title. At the end of the First Test, Holder had 259 points for, what transpired to be, his best performance of the series. It was only the indomitable Ben Stokes that stopped the Barbadian from getting top spot. Because we are living in an age of precious little cricket some very low scores topping our weekly lists. Three of our lowest scores have all come in the Corona era and Holder slides in at 6th lowest. This is not to denigrate his achievements. His form in the Third Test was much improved on the Second. His 68 second innings runs offered the Windies a sliver of hope - however it was merely a sliver. Personally, Holder has shot up the table during this series - the steepest part of his climb was this week. The final week before lockdown saw Holder move off bottom spot for the first time since his debut. From there he progressed slowly and steadily up to his current spot in 6th. This week he overtook Marnus Labuschagne, Aaron Finch, Travis Head and (more impressively) Babar Azam. There is now two weeks of inactivity for Holder before the beginning of the CPL. With Azam the next man to face Stokes and Joe Root, he is unlikely to stay there for much longer. When he does play again he will be jostling for a top five place again - it all depends on how much ground is lost in that time.

It was a week of reversed fortune for Stokes and Root. Stokes, who has been so monumental since the cessation of cricket, got a mere 20 points. On the other side of the coin, Root, who looked under baked in the Second Test got the third highest score of the Week. This saw the Yorkshireman jump two places on the list to make it an English one-two at the top of the list. I often criticise Root for a lack of consistency in his performances. The allegation I lay at his door is that he disappears in big games. But how dependable are our Englishmen? Over the last three years we have had eight English players in our Lists. Root has been with us for all three years whilst Stokes is midway through his second year. Jos Buttler had two complete years and Jofra Archer, Jack Leach and Jonny Bairstow had one year. The fairest way to judge their reliability is their average points scored per active week. When the numbers are crunched Joe Root sits just above average with 142.14 points per weeks played. Just as in this year's overall list, he trails Ben Stokes (178.75) with Jofra Archer in second (157). There are caveats galore to these figures. Stokes had a season in the IPL whilst Archer was on our List before he was a Test player meaning he could play the T20 circuit. What it does show is that Root is comfortably comfortable. He'll score what you expect of him about a third of the time, over exceed about a third of the time and fail over a third of the time. He's even Mr Dependable in terms of Cricketers of The Week: one in 2018, two in 2019, one this year. Ploughing away in a typically English manner. Below Root sits Jack Leach averaging 123.71 points per active week. In fifth and sixth are Jonny Bairstow with 119.8 and Jos Buttler 117.83. To be worth your place in this list, and in a team, averaging three figures every week is the expectation. We then turn to the two gentlemen who, thus far, average below that.


It is a double edged sword for Banton and Gregory that they are ton the cusp of the set up when cricket is at such a premium. They are being forced into the limelight at a time when they are rusty. If they do fail, there are fewer avenues for them to get their eye in. The other side of the coin is that if you play your cards right you can get a debut ahead of more established players and throw your hat in the ring. Banton has played his cards wrong and his hat is very much on his head. The Somerset wunderkind got the second highest points this week. This sounds decent until you consider he batted five times in four games of cricket. Such is the desperation for Banton to do well that, on getting out for a duck for Team Moeen he was allowed to bat again for the 'opposition'. He then preceded to get 3. Banton has only had 11 active weeks of cricket this year but averages a mere 69.91 per week. If you remove this busy week from the reckoning, it is an even more dire average of 60.3 - just under half Jonny Bairstow's average. With the final ODI v Ireland tomorrow, Banton needs to get a score orhe could be discarded. Despite his general lack of form, his busy diary has boosted him up a fair few places this week. He overleaps Shubman Gill, Mohammad Nabi and Glenn Maxwell into 14th.

Week

Jason Holder - 178
Tom Banton - 166
Joe Root- 155
Lewis Gregory - 119
Babar Azam - 57
Ben Stokes - 20



Kyle Abbott - dnp
Colin Ackermann - 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 - 2105
Joe Root - 1314
Martin Guptill - 1243
Keshav Maharaj - 1176
Steve Smith - 1109
Jason Holder- 1069
Babar Azam - 1061
Marnus Labuschagne - 1000
Aaron Finch - 980
Lewis Gregory - 938
Travis Head - 901
David Warner - 821
Virat Kohli - 787
Tom Banton - 769
Shubman Gill - 752
Mohammad Nabi - 701
Glenn Maxwell - 650
Rohit Sharma - 471
Peter Handscomb - 383

Jason Holder - The Best Cricketer of the Week

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

Abdur Razzak - The Best Cricketer of the Week

Very perfunctory blog today as I kinda got married yesterday but the bare bones are that Abdur Razzak won despite being the bottom most player in our list and not playing since April.

The other movers on the table were:

Moved up

Virat Kohli
Rashid Khan
Shai Hope

Moved down

Shakib Al Hasan
Joe Root
Ben Stokes
Shubman Gill

Week

Abdur Razzak - 329
Virat Kohli - 314
Rashid Khan - 162
Glenn Maxwell - 153
Joe Burns - 115
Shreyas Iyer - 96
Shai Hope - 38
Rohit Sharma - 33
Shakib Al Hasan - 25

Mohammad Abbas - dnp
Jonny Bairstow - dnp
Jos Buttler - dnp
Callum Ferguson- dnp
Shubman Gill - dnp
Simon Harmer - dnp
Jack Leach - dnp
Morne Morkel - dnp
Duanne Olivier - dnp
Wayne Parnell - dnp
Jeetan Patel - dnp
Joe Root - dnp
Ben Stokes - dnp
Kane Williamson - dnp
Kuldeep Yadav - dnp

Overall

Glenn Maxwell - 5420
Simon Harmer - 4974
Jeetan Patel - 4385
Virat Kohli- 3879
Shakib Al Hasan -3862
Rashid Khan - 3781
Joe Root- 3769
Ben Stokes - 3706
Jonny Bairstow - 3429
Rohit Sharma - 3311
Shreyas Iyer - 3000
Duanne Olivier - 2852
Jos Buttler - 2793
Wayne Parnell - 2743
Kane Williamson - 2498
Morne Morkel - 2438
Jack Leach - 2378
Shai Hope - 2128
Shubman Gill - 2102
Callum Ferguson - 1893
Mohammad Abbas - 1857
Kuldeep Yadav - 1694
Joe Burns - 1243
Abdur Razzak- 1157

Sunil Narine - The Best Cricketer of the Week

Could a player this year make more of an impact in one week than the dominance Sunil Narine has shown in the West Indies' Regional Super50 competition? The unlikeable mystery spinner has not played a game since the start of December when he turned out for the Dhaka Dynamites in the Bangladesh Premier League but he did not show any sign of rustiness as he scorched a 46 ball 51 for Trinidad and Tobago in the opening game against Barbados. He has since added to that with 10 wickets in three games over five days - his best being a stunning 5-10 over the Combined Campuses and Colleges team. His economy in all three games has been under three and his form must be leaving the West Indies team bitter at the fact that the precocious spinner still refuses to turn out for his national side, outside of major competitions. His 487 points in a week is the highest by an individual player so far in 2018 and catapults him up the overall table, putting him one position above Nathan Lyon - the first cricketer of the week from Week 1. If his dominance in this competition continues who knows how many points he can rack up. 

I thought that this might be the year for Kane Williamson to put himself back amongst the top batsmen in the world. A few years ago the four key batsmen of Kohli, Smith, Root and Williamson were setting the cricketing world alight. The first two have accelerated into the stratosphere, the third one has remained treading water whilst the last one....appears to be stagnating. He scored 17 runs across his two T20 games for New Zealand this week taking his run of single figure scores to three in a row. His average for 2018 stands at 31.4 but if you remove his two big scores against Pakistan it is a more worrying 15.75. Williamson needs to use the triangular tournament against England and Australia to turn his year around. 

I am still surprised to see JP Duminy at the top of the overall rankings - especially when his transition from domestic cricket back to international cricket ended with a thunderingly disappointing yield of just 12 runs. Despite this lack of form, that began in his final few games in the Momentum One Day Cup, there is only Joe Root who may overtake him in the near future. Shakib is injured, Mitchell Marsh is not selected for the T20 series and Jos Buttler is just too far off the pace. Regardless of his performances this week I still expect to see the unlikely figure of JP Duminy atop the overall list next week. 

With Duminy unexpected at the top, who here expected to see David Warner at the bottom? Only Jeetan Patel sits between Warner and the very bottom of the table - and the veteran New Zealander has played 4 less games than Warner. Warner finds himself in the rather ignominious position that George Bailey found himself in for a number of weeks over January; namely scoring more points with his work in the field compared to his batting. Even more gallingly, Bailey now sits seven places above the stand in Australian captain with 129 points separating them. 

Week 

Sunil Narine 487
Virat Kohli 162
Mitchell Marsh 106
George Bailey 103
Joe Root 92
Jos Buttler 61
David Warner 61
Shaun Marsh 60 
Quinton de Kock 44
Jofra Archer 30
Kane Williamson 27 
Dean Elgar 20
Rashid Khan 20
Hashim Amla 16
JP Duminy 12
Steve Smith 12 
Nathan Lyon 1
Shakib Al Hasan dnp 
Ravi Ashwin dnp
Simon Harmer dnp
Ravi Jadeja dnp
AB De Villiers dnp
Aaron Finch dnp 
Jeetan Patel dnp

Overall

JP Duminy - 761
Joe Root - 622
Shakib Al Hasan - 608
Mitchell Marsh - 605
Jos Buttler - 597
Aaron Finch - 591
Virat Kohli- 538
Kane Williamson - 497
Sunil Narine- 487
Nathan Lyon - 466
Ravi Ashwin - 435
Jofra Archer - 405
Rashid Khan - 390
Simon Harmer - 351
George Bailey - 344
AB De Villiers- 321
Quinton de Kock - 315
Hashim Amla - 289
Dean Elgar- 286
Steve Smith - 275
Shaun Marsh- 256
David Warner - 215
Jeetan Patel - 108
Ravi Jadeja - ytp