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

Lewis Gregory - The Best Cricketer of the Week

Through a combination of injury, players being rested and the cessation of the BBL, we have seen the number of non active players jump up hugely this week. We have also seen the list settling down rather. Only four players made any movement on the overall list and we saw a few players make double figure scores and yet it not have an effect on their overall position. This did not apply to our Cricketer of the Week who used an A team tour for it's exact purpose - to showcase your abilities against a weak opponent. Lewis Gregory is an undoubtedly talented player and should feel most aggrieved that he happened to reach his cricketing maturation at the same time as Ben Stokes was the most dominant force in world cricket (and the leader of our overall List). In many ways Gregory does exactly what Stokes does....just a little bit worse. His performance this week against a New South Wales XI had a Stokesian aspect to it. Two wickets at an economy of 3.29 plus a 34 ball 55 and a catch in the field is an all round performance that even the Durham man would be proud of. But the difference is that it was against a second string Sheffield Shield side who had three players making their debut. In order to shrug off the mantle of being a store brand Stokes, he needs to be doing this more regularly. His average weekly score for his three active weeks before this week was 93.66 - decent, but this was still against teams of the calibre of a Cricket Australia XI and Dhaka. This week saw him jump from sixteenth to thirteenth and he is already chasing the pack from the top ten. It is still early days for the Somerset player but he needs to up his game to be a force on our List. He is going to be a key player for Peshawar in the PSL which will help, but he will need to improve on his 292 runs he gained for Rangpur in the BPL.

So that is the highest scoring player for the week, however he wasn't the biggest mover up the overall table. That accolade goes to two players I wrote about last week: Shubman Gill and Keshav Maharaj. Gill was a player that I have consistently questioned the consistency of however over the last fortnight he has scored back to back centuries for (what I believe is) the first time in his career. He really is picking up some momentum in his international career and may be forcing his way into a Test berth for the men in blue - especially with the injury to twelfth place Rohit Sharma. This has been reflected in his surge up the table. Last week he bumped his way up the table from seventeenth to ninth; this week he has improved his position by a further five to find himself in fourth position overall. Sandwiched between the figures of Joe Root in third and Virat Kohli in fifth is a very lofty position for the boy from Punjab; how long can he keep his foot on the accelerator? Maharaj also followed in Gill's footsteps with his second top five finish in a row and a five place improvement on the overall table largely thanks to one of his two matches for the Dolphins in the Momentum One Day Cup. His four wickets at an economy of 3.20 coupled with a catch against the bottom of the table Knights saw his dominant franchise continue their impressive spell in the competition and continue to force his own personal agenda as a spinner of high quality. We are used to seeing a South African bowler on the up and up on this list - however it is usually Simon Harmer, who is pointless thus far in the year. We are not even a quarter of the way through this franchise competition yet and with the South African spinner fifteen points off a top five position I wouldn't be surprised to see more progression from the joint highest wicket taker of the tournament.

I said the overall list was settling down quite nicely and Babar Azam is proof of this. Azam is one of the hottest prospects in world cricket but has only featured in two games so far this year - scoring 116 points in one game and zero in the other. At the start of the week he was rock bottom of active players. His impeccable Day Two performance for Pakistan in their First Test against Bangladesh was one of the more high profile performances of the Week and when he went to stumps many were salivating over a potential double ton - however this did not come to pass. Despite this he still finished fourth with 173 points for the week and was part of the 12 point pile up between 1st and 4th. This success for the week has not had the desired impact on his overall placing for the year, however, as he moved up just one place, leap-frogging Peter Handscomb into seventeenth position. Looking further up the table he is another 100 points of sixteenth place Tom Banton - already a gulf is starting to form at the bottom of the table. There will be a lot of cricket to play for Azam as he joins up with Karachi for the PSL, finishes the series with Bangladesh and, ultimately, rejoins Somerset - he will not be this close to the bottom when the final tally is counted. This gulf is probably more concerning for our four inactive players; Kyle Abott, Colin Ackermann, Simon Harmer and Jason Holder. If a top five performance sees you sluggishly crawl from bottom to second bottom, these four players, who are already 239 points (and counting) below our least effective active player they have got a world of catching up to do when they join the melee.

Week

Lewis Gregory - 185
Keshav Maharaj - 184
Shubman Gill - 176
Babar Azam- 173
Ben Stokes - 141
Martin Guptill- 106
Joe Root - 69
Tom Banton - 62
Virat Kohli - 29

Kyle Abbott - dnp
Colin Ackermann - dnp
Aaron Finch- dnp
Peter Handscomb- dnp
Simon Harmer - dnp
Travis Head - dnp
Jason Holder - dnp
Marnus Labuschagne- dnp
Glenn Maxwell - dnp
Mohammad Nabi- dnp
Rohit Sharma- dnp
Steve Smith - dnp
David Warner - dnp

Overall

Ben Stokes - 950
Martin Guptill - 887
Joe Root - 829
Shubman Gill - 744
Virat Kohli - 729
Keshav Maharaj - 714
Steve Smith - 662
Glenn Maxwell - 650
Marnus Labuschagne - 649
Mohammad Nabi - 590
Aaron Finch - 558
Rohit Sharma - 471
Lewis Gregory - 466
Travis Head - 458
David Warner - 392
Tom Banton - 389
Babar Azam - 289
Peter Handscomb - 239