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

The Spirit of Cricket - The Best Cricketer of the Week

Please allow me a moment. For the first time in thirteen long weeks, I am sat at my desk about to write about cricket from the previous week. It has been thirteen long weeks since I last did that. Weeks filled with worry and concern. Unnatural weeks. I am a teacher and have spent the last weeks working from home (regardless of what the Daily Mail might tell you). On top of this I am expecting my first child towards the end of next month. For many first-time parents this is an unnatural time anyway but when you add the removal of sport it seemed even more unnatural. Sport is a triviality but in these stressful times it is the frivolous nature of sport that allows us to lose ourselves in it for 90 minutes, a day or a weekend.

The most reassuring thing about sport is it's ever present nature . If it isn't the cricket at Lord's , it would have been the football in Bilbao or the golf in America that would take you into the early hours. All those sporting fixtures should of been played out today - only one is. All would have been a respite. A moment to dip in, zone out and lose yourself. Yet now, when we needed that respite the most, it seemed like the cruellest twist of fate that it was removed from us.

As the sensible amongst us are beginning to eke our way out of lockdown, sport is beginning to inch it's way back into our day to day life. Starting with the most important and the most economically suitable, we are beginning to see the games we love return . This week we saw our first player from the List don their whites. When I went to put his score on my spreadsheet - which I still fill out on paper like a Luddite - I left a crosschecked square to mark the thirteen weeks since the cessation of cricket. On inputting the Week 26 score I was annoyed to find that it meant that the spreadsheet was now askew and didn't line up. But perhaps that is fitting. A dark line etched on our society - both socially and sportingly - that means that nothing will quite line up again.

The game that we love will not be the same in the short term and, in many cases, it will struggle to be the same in the long term. The West Indies series will, at times, seem anodyne and nothing like the Summertime spectacle that we know England home games to be. Things that wouldn't have been huge considerations 6 months ago need to be considered. No crowd, new rules, the England captain missing from duty for two weeks due to the birth of his child are all very modern concerns. These minor inconveniences will be insignificant compared to the seismic effect on cricket clubs up and down the land. Many of these village clubs, who struggle year on year, will be plunged into further debt or dissolved.

Even to those for whom cricket is important, it has, at times, seemed insignificant over the last three months. As we prepare to welcome some of it back, as we lust after the battles between bat and ball and lose ourselves in the finites of techniques, statistics and record, we must also pause to consider the sacrifices that have been made. In the most macrocosmic scale, we need to spare a thought to those who have lost their lives or the lives of loved ones. We must also never forget those who have risked their lives to help. Cricket has played a small part in this. Kohli used his immense social media pull to implore the people of India to abide by the lockdown whilst Heather Knight and Amir Virdi put themselves in the front line. Our great game has remained a great game even when it wasn't played.

Credit also needs to be given to the West Indies and Pakistan teams for honouring their commitments and coming to play this Summer. Much has been made of the advance payments to West Indies Cricket and the PCB - which many have described as a pay off or bribe. As far as I can see, we have two squads of players who could have said no, but said yes. That has to be applauded. It means we will see Babar Azam, Jason Holder, Joe Root and Ben Stokes scoring points again - and there were times when that looked like it wouldn't happen. As for the other 17 players on the list, we will have to see. But cricket is back. And don't you love to see it!

Another great thing about this game of ours, and by association our List, is that it can sometimes take the mick. Sport is all about anticipation - and when that anticipation is built up, the climax is usually higher. Ask Sting. Think of big crickets big cathartic moments. Think Ben Stokes at the World Cup last year. Think about Middlesex's win in 2016. Think about the 2005 Ashes. But there are also the damp squibs. In the first week with any cricket to speak of, we have the dampest of damp squibs. The first post-Lockdown score on the board turns out to be the greatest biggest zero you could imagine. It was all set up for Jason Holder. He scored a huge 233 points in the last active game pre-Lockdown as Barbados beat Guyana. There would have been a great cyclical nature for him to have got even 50 points. But it was not to be. International cricket's Mr Nice Guy is suffering with an ankle injury so protected himself by not bowling in the cobbled together WI Holder XI v WI Brathwaite XI. He did bat. For one ball where he got a golden duck as part of a bravo display from Raymon Reifer. So there we have it. Our first score in 13 weeks is 0 but....you know what! I'll take it.