Simon Harmer - The Best Cricketer of the Week

A week that started with two man of the match performances on finals day and ended with his team in possession of the County Championship also sees Simon Harmer claim his second successive Cricketer of the Week award. Harmer has been an instrumental figure for Essex since he joined in 2017 and many thought that his performance in his debut season would not be hard to top, however his 2019 has probably surpassed that. At the start of the year Harmer set out his stall for a total of 80 Championship wickets - 8 more than he got in the title winning season and 23 more than he got last year - he blew this away in the thrilling denouement to the season and reached 83. His form this year has been making people ponder if he is the best overseas signing the County Championship has ever seen. This may be a bit myopic at this moment in time as it is all too easy to live in the moment and forget the Lehmanns, the Mushtaqs and even the Wayne Daniels of this world. One thing that is difficult to argue is that Harmer is one of the best spinners in the World game at this time and Essex should think themselves very fortunate that they are in possession of him. His 428 point week sees him draw away from third place rather dramatically, but also really narrows the gap between himself and first placed Glenn Maxwell. The long time runaway leader is starting to tire now and only has a 203 point jump on Harmer. The difference may be that Maxwell is already embedded in the Marsh One Day Cup whilst Harmer has a month before the start of his next likely outing - the Mzansi Super League.

The trend over the last 21 weeks of this ranking system is that there are early front runners that slip away into comfortable mid table obscurity. Last year it was JP Duminy who was numero uno for the first few months but slipped back to 20th by the end of the year. This year there were two players that made the early running. Shreyas Iyer was the first and he has done the polite thing and slipped away to 14th. The other was Shakib Al Hasan who had an amazing BPL and forced his way into the top spot but then slipped away for eleven weeks and subsequently dropped down the table - but never out of the top ten. Then came the Summer of Shakib, where his World Cup performances were simply majestic and he forced his way back up the table and entered the top five once more. It then seemed all too likely that he would fade away and continue his descent down the table. However like an accountant at a party, he refuses to go away. His output in the T20 tri-series with Afghanistan and Zimbabwe have seen him pick up another 551 points in three weeks. This seems him muscle his way past Virat Kohli and Jonny Bairstow and settle in behind Rashid Khan in seventh spot - the only player to move up the table this week. Forthcoming there is another spell where I don't think the Bangladesh captain will be playing any cricket. He is not playing in the MSL and the next national outing is against India in November but don't put it past him to drift downwards before a quick spurt of activity pushes him back towards the top five again.

I appear to mentioning the word 'drift' rather a lot today, but we are at that point of the year where less cricket is being played and we see some of those players who played well earlier in the year start to fade away. Rohit Sharma is a prime candidate for that. The Hitman was our fourth most prolific player during the World Cup period with 967 points and moving up from twelfth position to eight position - however his yield from there has been weak. Thanks to his non selection for the Tests against the West Indies, he has played just eight games since his 1 against New Zealand in India's final World Cup game. In this time he has had a score of 68 in a warm up game against West Indies A and 67 in a T20 against the full West Indies side, all his other scores are of 25 or less and his average is 26. If you remove his 68 against a relatively weak West Indies A side it is an even worse 17.5. This has seen him drop from eight place back down to tenth. He has been cut a break due to the fact that the chasing pack now have a spell away from the game with Olivier, in eleventh, not playing until the MSL and twelfth placed Jos Buttler not likely to play until England's tour to New Zealand. The problem is that Sharma himself is unlikely to see much time in the middle as India now turn their attention to the Tests versus South Africa. It could be a year of what ifs for the prolific white ball Cricketer

Week

Simon Harmer - 428
Joe Burns - 179
Jack Leach - 171
Shakib Al Hasan - 150
Glenn Maxwell - 125
Wayne Parnell - 124
Mohammad Abbas - 82
Rashid Khan - 61
Callum Ferguson - 45
Jeetan Patel - 30
Virat Kohli - 19
Morne Morkel - 10
Rohit Sharma - 9
Shreyas Iyer - 5
Duanne Olivier - 0

Jonny Bairstow - dnp
Jos Buttler - dnp
Shubman Gill - dnp
Shai Hope - dnp
Abdur Razzak - dnp
Joe Root - dnp
Ben Stokes - dnp
Kane Williamson - dnp
Kuldeep Yadav - dnp

Overall

Glenn Maxwell - 5177
Simon Harmer - 4974
Jeetan Patel - 4385
Joe Root- 3769
Ben Stokes - 3706
Rashid Khan - 3613
Shakib Al Hasan -3541
Virat Kohli- 3494
Jonny Bairstow - 3429
Rohit Sharma - 2874
Duanne Olivier - 2852
Jos Buttler - 2793
Wayne Parnell - 2743
Shreyas Iyer - 2533
Kane Williamson - 2498
Morne Morkel - 2438
Jack Leach - 2378
Shubman Gill - 2102
Shai Hope - 1976
Callum Ferguson - 1835
Mohammad Abbas - 1787
Kuldeep Yadav - 1694
Joe Burns - 1107
Abdur Razzak- 898

Shreyas Iyer - The Best Cricketer of the Week

In a week where precious little cricket was played by our contributors, there was one nation that stood head and shoulders over the rest. In our (notional) top 5 this week there is no less than 3 Indian players. Leading the pack this week is a young Indian batsman who is forcing his agenda for selection in all forms of the game through his A team performances. August was a good month for Shreyas Iyer. After having having the good fortune to be left out of India's World Cup run, he benefited from their underwhelming performance to be one of the call ups for the West Indies series and did himself proud. This week he followed that up with his return to A team action where he impressed in two rain affected games against South Africa A to continue his rise up the table. Thanks to a very strong start to the year Iyer's period of inaction over the middle months of the year meant that he never sunk below mid table overall. This week has seen overtake Kane Williamson and move into 14th. The other Indian player to move up the table is a more high profile one. Virat Kohli thrives in matches against the West Indies - and this week was no exception. His score of 76 runs with three catches in the field was enough for him to finish second this week despite the fact he was out for a duck in the second innings. His 126 runs for the week see him overtake Jonny Bairstow and move into sixth. The last name to make up our Indian trio is Shubman Gill. In a normal week a total of 83 would be unlikely to see you finish in the top five and, in truth, Gill would be disappointed to get just 43 runs across three One Day games however there he is bringing up the rear in this Indian summer for Indian cricket.

Perhaps while we are talking all thing Indian we should linger over two Indian players who received zero this week. For the longest period of time Kuldeep Yadav's form for the Indian Test team was the only thing that was keeping his head above water and buoying him up from his year being a total embarrassment. The last couple of weeks have seen this slip away from him. Yadav has now played neither Test against the West Indies and had a disappointing time of it in the ODIs. Stranded, as he is, in the bottom 3 with a 143 point gap between him and Mohammad Abbas, you cannot help but feel that a Ravindra Jadeja style spurt up the table is becoming increasingly unlikely. With the rise of Navdeep Saini and the evergreen Ravi Ashwin (formerly of this parish), Kuldeep must be feeling the pressure for his place in the team. Another, more high profile, omission from these two Test matches is tenth place Rohit Sharma. A strong contributor in the World Cup and a decent warm up game against a West Indies A side did not impress the Indian selectors enough to give him a berth in the first team. With Hanuma Vihari performing so well in his stead, one can't help but wonder if this was the last chance for Sharma to convert his short ball prowess into a Test career. As we approach the last third of the year, we turn our minds to who might be on our list for 2020. Yadav and Sharma are both players who have question marks over their continuation - however with a T20 World Cup Sharma is a more favourable selection than his younger compatriot.

I have questioned Rashid Khan all the way though 2019. He has seemed under baked throughout the year. Whether it be in the IPL or in the T20 Blast, his form is significantly down from 2018 and his World Cup was a disappointment. This being said it has been a long while since Rashid has bowled in Asia and, whenever he joins up with his national side he always gets a boost. If you join this together, we could see a boost up the table. The series kicked off with a four day warm up game against a Bangladesh Cricket Board XI that saw Rashid pick up three wickets and get his highest weekly score for six weeks. We talk about Rashid Khan as if he has been around for ages, however he is still (officially) twenty and we could be in for another decade and a half of the young Afghanistan spinner breaking boundaries, however to do this he will need consistency and flexibility. My biggest fear for Rashid is that he will turn into a second Mustafizur Rahman. The Fizz burst on to the scene with all the pyrotechnics of Rashid and took the world by storm but soon enough his sparkle began to leave him. He is still capable of big performances (see his back to back fivefers in the World Cup) but he is nowhere near the standard he was expected to obtain. This Is down to the fact he was something of a One trick pony and once his action had been spotted he needed to adapt or perish. Rashid needs to learn from this and regularly be hitting his straps and varying his deliveries in order to be as destructive as he was in 2018.

Week

Shreyas Iyer - 142
Virat Kohli - 126
Rashid Khan - 123
Shubman Gill - 83
Glenn Maxwell - 34
Simon Harmer - 20

Mohammad Abbas - dnp
Shakib Al Hasan - dnp
Jonny Bairstow - dnp
Joe Burns - dnp
Jos Buttler - dnp
Callum Ferguson - dnp
Shai Hope - dnp
Jack Leach - dnp
Morne Morkel - dnp
Duanne Olivier - dnp
Wayne Parnell - dnp
Jeetan Patel - dnp
Abdur Razzak - dnp
Joe Root - dnp
Rohit Sharma - dnp
Ben Stokes - dnp
Kane Williamson - dnp
Kuldeep Yadav - dnp

Overall

Glenn Maxwell - 4892
Simon Harmer - 3956
Jeetan Patel - 3905
Ben Stokes - 3532
Joe Root- 3450
Virat Kohli- 3353
Jonny Bairstow - 3271
Shakib Al Hasan - 2990
Rashid Khan - 2958
Rohit Sharma - 2853
Wayne Parnell - 2619
Jos Buttler - 2571
Duanne Olivier - 2534
Shreyas Iyer - 2512
Kane Williamson - 2498
Morne Morkel - 2172
Shai Hope - 1976
Jack Leach - 1891
Shubman Gill - 1875
Callum Ferguson - 1790
Mohammad Abbas - 1705
Kuldeep Yadav - 1562
Joe Burns - 928
Abdur Razzak- 898

Shubman Gill - The Best Cricketer of the Week

Writing last week I said that the bottom four contributors on our overall list, led by Shubman Gill, would have to do something special in order to stop their slow drift away from the main pack. This week Shubman Gill became the youngest Indian player to score a double century as he reached 201* for India A in their third Test against West Indies A. This has seen the young Indian batsman claim his first Cricketer of the Week accolade - the eighteenth player on our list of twenty four to have won the award at least once in 2019. There can't have been many Test double hundreds that were scored at a strike rate of over 80 but Gill also managed to bolster his score for the week by picking up 10 points for a strike rate of 82.25. He has also dramatically pulled away from third from bottom placed Kuldeep Yadav and made a true bottom three that have 253 points to make up in order to join the rest of the pack. Gill is now cheek by jowl with Callum Ferguson and Jack Leach who all have just four points between them - however Ferguson has the T20 Blast and Leach has just been called back up to The Ashes squad. In comparison this could be the high point for Gill for some time. 

Virat Kohli, the foremost talent in world cricket, is in our weekly top five this week. No big deal, huh? Well actually it is. This has been rarer than you would have thought this year. The last time this happened was at the end of June. Before that it was the start of April. Before that you have to go back to the start of March. In this time both Shubman Gill and Shreyas Iyer have featured in the weekly top five more times than Kohli has. The below average year for the Indian captain has been well publicised. Last week we calculated that he was 319 points down on this point last year - so his 147 points thanks to 87 runs from two T20 matches against West Indies will be gratefully received. He has also moved from tenth position into ninth - over-taking his colleague and (if some people are to be believed) rival Rohit Sharma. Kohli is undoubtably a class act and he should be looking up the table and not down. Above him is an upwardly mobile Rashid Khan but just 227 points above him in seventh place is Shakib Al Hasan. The Bangladesh stalwart is taking a well earned break after his World Cup exertions and those around him are taking advantage. This week both Jonny Bairstow and Ben Stokes have overtaken him, forcing him out of the top five for the first time in five weeks. With the places between fifth and eight in flux, Kohli could take advantage and hit the top five if he impresses against West Indies, a team he has historically done well against. 

That first Ashes Test was a weird one in terms of points. England fans will be disappointed with the manner of their defeat but many contributions were decent. Two Englishman finish in the top five for the week. Ben Stokes finishes second and puts himself just outside the top five overall whilst Joe Root finishes fourth. Even the disappointing Jonny Bairstow manages to squeeze his way into the top five and Jack Leach is promised further points in the second Test thanks to his call up at the expense of Moeen Ali. The only player who has nothing good going for them is Jos Buttler. The sometime wicket keeper and explosive batsman was neither of those things in the first Test and got a mere 26 points. He languishes well off the pace in the overall list too, as he is just outside the top ten. Buttler will for ever be seared on England fans' memories due to his World Cup exploits but, aside from the final, his contribution over the World Cup was minimal. When we did our calculations at the end of the World Cup he was the third least prolific points scorer behind Rashid and Glenn Maxwell. It seems like this trend is continuing. Between the first day of the World Cup and today, Jos Buttler has scored 695 points, this is the lowest of anyone in the top 13. In that time Simon Harmer has put on 1891 points with Jeetan Patel gaining 1755 and Joe Root adding 1343. If Buttler has aspirations of breaking into that top ten he needs to be outscoring them more regularly. Something he has not been doing for the last twelve weeks. 

Week

Shubman Gill - 264
Ben Stokes- 206 
Virat Kohli - 147
Joe Root - 135
Rohit Sharma - 105
Wayne Parnell - 100
Jeetan Patel - 88
Rashid Khan - 71 
Jonny Bairstow - 64
Duanne Olivier - 40
Callum Ferguson - 33 
Jos Buttler - 26
Simon Harmer - 12
Kane Williamson - 10

Mohammad Abbas - dnp 
Shakib Al Hasan - dnp 
Joe Burns- dnp 
Shai Hope - dnp 
Shreyas Iyer - dnp 
Jack Leach- dnp 
Glenn Maxwell - dnp 
Morne Morkel- dnp 
Abdur Razzak - dnp 
Kuldeep Yadav- dnp 

Overall 

Glenn Maxwell - 4439
Jeetan Patel - 3662
Simon Harmer - 3654
Joe Root- 3309
Jonny Bairstow - 3029
Ben Stokes - 3011
Shakib Al Hasan - 2990
Rashid Khan - 2835
Virat Kohli- 2763
Rohit Sharma - 2737
Jos Buttler - 2502
Kane Williamson - 2414
Wayne Parnell - 2325
Duanne Olivier - 2305
Shreyas Iyer - 2144
Morne Morkel - 2092
Shai Hope - 1861
Callum Ferguson - 1684
Jack Leach - 1683
Shubman Gill - 1681
Mohammad Abbas - 1655
Kuldeep Yadav - 1402
Joe Burns - 928
Abdur Razzak- 898