2019 All Year Fantasy Competition

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Jonny doing well in whatever chances he has got so far with SRH will probably mean he plays all matches for SRH until England players leave on April 30. Guptill might replace him as opener only in later part of IPL if Jonny's form stays consistent. Rohit Sharma scoring more this year because he is opening now for MI.

Added bonus is Bairstow (or any England player in the IPL) must play at least one Royal London Cup game before the home ODIs commence.

Some commentator mentioned today that Jos is leaving on April 23. I guess that must be same for Jonny as well to leave for England. I thought they would be in IPL till the month end.Anyways enough points so far and I expect him to represent in few Vitality Blast matches as well.

[Durhamfootman]

Still no Abbas for Leicester

He must still be away not playing white ball cricket for Pakistan...... not bad for a bloke who doesn't play white ball cricket internationally. He'll probably be in their WC squad so he can not play in the WC

I think I've stuffed up here

[andy]

Shakib not being selected is killing me!

[Durhamfootman]

I got the chance to ask Paul Nixon about Mo Abbas, today. Seems Pakistan insisted he attended a WC training camp despite him almost certainly never having been particularly in their WC thoughts. He is now waiting for a visa or work permit, or something, but Leics are expecting that to be sorted in the next few days. Blooming Pakistan

Hopefully he'll be back in action for me soon and I can start my inexorable rise up the table

[The Professor]

I enjoy the fact that a head coach of a cricket team is facing questions about this game.

[The Professor]

2019 is the year of Glenn Maxwell. The man is utterly phenomenal and everything he touches turns good. At this rate his inclusion in the Australian Ashes team is looking ever more likely to go alongside his key position in the one day side for the World Cup and his ongoing success in every domestic side he even looks at. This week he registered 402 points from three games - and did it predominantly through wickets. He has claimed 10 scalps for Lancashire in his four match stint for them getting his career best figures of 5-40 against Middlesex. In comparison he has only scored 181 runs. The fact that we know for a fact that Maxwell can bat quick and bat big means that even performing in just one of his disciplines he can still top our weekly poll as he does this week for the fourth time. Last year it took Simon Harmer (more from him later) until the middle of May to be the first player to four Cricketer of the Week titles. His lead at the top of the overall table is now stretched to an unheard of 896 points as he extends his reign in first place into a seventh week.

Last year I wrote endlessly about the form of Simon Harmer and Jeetan Patel. Not a week would go by when one of these grand old bowlers would not be mentioned - and not just for their County Championship performances but also for their contributions in their home domestic leagues. This has not been quite so much the case this year. Harmer featured early on in the Momentum One Day Cup for the Warriors but disappeared until his reemergence with Essex over the last couple of weeks. He has nearly half the points he had at this point last year - 1180 in 2019 compared to 2011. The same can be said of Jeetan Patel. The restructuring of the New Zealand cricket season has seen a much greater focus on the T20 game - Patel's weakest format. This has seen him play an awful lot of cricket in the English winter but not particularly allowing him to pick up as many points. He lags behind his 2018 total at this point in the year by 431 points. This being said as the seasons have begun to turn in England and the weather has become distinctly more crickety we have seen these two bowlers bloom like daffodils. Both players have got their highest score for 2019 this season and look promising for things to come. They are also in a much more familiar position on our weekly table - finishing second and third this week. The top four is rounded off by a new bowler to our list who wishes to follow in their mould. Morne Morkel was the Championship's top bowler last season but has had the winter off cricket for the first time since the start of his career. At the start of this week he was bottom placed in the overall league but he has scored more in the last week than he has in the previous fifteen weeks combined. These three Division One bowling stars should be on an upward trajectory from here or in and will be challenging for those top spots soon enough.

In contrast to the upward surge of the County Championship trio we have seen two stars of world cricket on a downward plummet after a strong start to 2019. In Week Two, Kane Williamson and Kuldeep Yadav were first and second in the overall table. From there on in they spent January and February flirting with the the top 5. At the start of January it was Kuldeep who spent a couple of weeks in the overall top five. The few weeks that followed that saw Kane Williamson in and out. So where are these two international superstars now? Williamson is in 13th place and Kuldeep is in 15th place. Their fall has been precipitous. Weeks five to nine saw the Indian spinner drop from third to twelfth - gaining just 145 points whilst Kane Williamson's fall from grace was brought about by his lack of appearances and then subsequent lack of form in the IPL. In Week 11 Kane Williamson was sixth but Week on Week he has slipped down the table to be less than midway this week. The two players performances this week has been indicative of the form that has seen them slip down the table. Both players have played two games for their IPL teams - Kuldeep got 20 points for a solitary wicket against Bangalore but registered a zero point game against Chennai . Williamson did even worse than that with just six runs split equally across his two games. Both of these players would have seen the IPL as their chance to warm up for the World Cup with a run of good form but are on their way to having to turn around a pretty poor spell of form to improve their fortunes.

Week

Glenn Maxwell - 402
Simon Harmer - 326
Jeetan Patel - 280
Morne Morkel - 207
Jonny Bairstow- 202
Virat Kohli- 198
Joe Root - 184
Duanne Olivier - 150
Wayne Parnell - 146
Abdur Razzak - 123
Rohit Sharma - 108
Rashid Khan - 90
Shreyas Iyer - 78
Jos Buttler - 53
Shubman Gill - 34
Kuldeep Yadav- 20
Kane Williamson - 6

Mohammad Abbas - dnp
Shakib Al Hasan - dnp
Joe Burns- dnp
Callum Ferguson - dnp
Shai Hope - dnp
Jack Leach- dnp
Ben Stokes - dnp

Overall

Glenn Maxwell - 2574
Virat Kohli- 1678
Rashid Khan - 1589
Joe Root- 1589
Shreyas Iyer - 1553
Jonny Bairstow - 1491
Ben Stokes - 1444
Jos Buttler - 1381
Rohit Sharma - 1337
Duanne Olivier - 1310
Shakib Al Hasan - 1191
Simon Harmer - 1180
Kane Williamson - 1095
Jeetan Patel - 1023
Kuldeep Yadav - 1022
Abdur Razzak- 816
Joe Burns - 699
Callum Ferguson - 671
Shubman Gill - 569
Mohammad Abbas - 471
Shai Hope - 465
Wayne Parnell - 379
Morne Morkel - 320
Jack Leach - 309

Headlines

Huge score for RD sees him surge up the table.
Sussex falls down the table.
Third duck in a row leaves Andy second to bottom.

Week

RD - 609
DFM - 326
MIB - 310
Ian - 300
RDJ - 273
Arthur - 237
Sussex - 204
Alviro - 146
GGAS - 90
The Professor- 78
DC - 34
Andy - 0

Overall

Arthur - 2970
RD - 2894
MIB - 2828
Sussex - 2773
The Professor- 2250
RDJ - 2126
DC - 2013
Ian - 1945
GG-AS - 1898
DFM - 1651
Andy - 1628
Alviro- 1050

[Durhamfootman]

I enjoy the fact that a head coach of a cricket team is facing questions about this game.

so do I. he was happy to talk about it too. Wouldn't happen in football

Good work Prof. I'm off the bottom and off second bottom. Once I get my full complement of players involved I ought to begin rising up the table. Feels like I'm starting from a long way back this year. Maxwell might prove to be a headache this year thanks to his involvement with Lancs

The AYR FL might prove to be very county championship-like..... hard to win 2 years in a row

[Arthur Crabtree]

Back on top.

I remember when I was a kid Carlisle were unbeaten and top of the top division after a third of the season. I think they were relegated.

[Durhamfootman]

they were top after the first 4 games, if I recall correctly. Then the slide started. They did indeed get relegated. I wonder how long ago that was?

I have a feeling a very young Peter Beardsley might have been playing for them, but then my feelings are so often wide of the mark

[Arthur Crabtree]

Beardo was at Carlisle from 1978 and the season they briefly topped the league was 1974-5. Chris Balderstone was playing then.

[Durhamfootman]

fair enough. good info

[The Professor]

In times gone by Jeetan Patel was a regular table topper but it seemed like those times had gone by as it has been a very long wait for the veteran New Zealander. The last time Patel was the best Cricketer of the Week was in the first week of last September where he got a tenfer for Warwickshire against Middlesex which equaled his best ever yield of wickets in a First Class innings. This week saw him equal his best ever yield for a List A match with a fivefer in his game against Nottinghamshire this week. He added to this accolade a further two wickets against Northamptonshire and 26 runs across all three of his Royal London One Day Cup games this week. This moves him into the middle of the our overall table. Not too shabby at all for a player who just four weeks ago was 17th and had half the 1268 points he now has. It is notable that the shorter the form of the game the lower Patel's scores get, so to score big in a fifty over competition will be a bonus for him and, on the return to County Championship games, I would expect to see him continue his march up the table.

Although we have assembled an Avengers-like group of Cricketers this year - they have not been able to flex their superpowers as much as we thought in the world's premier T20 tournament. Last week we focussed on the poor form of Kane Williamson and Kuldeep Yadav. This has continued this week with Kane 'Black (Caps) Widow' Williamson registering just 8 runs in his game against Kolkata and Kuldeep 'Falcon' Yadav being erased by his franchise and left on the bench. But it is unfair to focus solely on these two players as there are many more from our list who are failing to impress in IPL2019. Cricket's Incredible Hulk, Ben Stokes, has looked decidedly more like Bruce Banner in his games for Rajasthan. He began the tournament in our overall top 5 but he has scored a mere 123 runs across his eight games, which sees him return to England with a batting average of 15.38 and his overall ranking move down to 7th. Shubman Gill is cricket's Spider-Man. A young impressionable Cricketer that has undeniable skills but needs someone to take him under their wing and mentor him if he is going to reach his potential. Those hawk-eyed cricket fans amongst us will have noticed that he has been spectacularly misfiring this season. Despite playing every single Kolkata game his average currently stands at 14.22 - and even this paltry score is buoyed up by a score of 65 against Delhi. With that score removed he would be in even more peril with an average of just 7.88. Then we come to Shakib Al Hasan. Who is he? Well you might ask. He is Adam Warlock. He is a hugely successful and popular character in times gone by in a format he feels at home in (Shakib topped our league from weeks 4 to weeks 10 thanks to his performances in the BPL). Many of his biggest fans have been expecting him to make it in the big time. However time after time he just never shows up. Shakib has been rather sidelined for Messrs. Bairstow and Williamson in terms of Hyderabad's overseas player. This week he made his return in a game against Chennai in which he seemed seemed like Mr Invisible by registering zero points. It really does seem like these players that we are so used to seeing striding majestically across our cricketing skyline are really struggling this year. I cannot imagine this will be their endgame though as, with the exception of Gill, they will all be back on our silver screens for the World Cup where they will hope to improve.

Should you think I am being overly negative, I would like to focus on a player who has surprised me by being so consistently good in the IPL. Previously I have spoken about the quiet manner in which Delhi's Shreyas Iyer has been grinding out winning performances for his franchise. Week on week I expect him to drop out of our overall top 5. Last week he threatened to do so after only having a 62 point cushion off sixth place Jonny Bairstow. With Bairstow having another media-grabbingly positive week for Hyderabad I thought it must be time for Iyer to slope off down the table, however he has finished off by moving up to third again thanks to his combination of batting bonus points and points for fielding and strike rate. This is yet another example of the quiet man of Indian cricket going about his business inconspicuously and forcing his own little agenda. The fact that he has been overlooked for the World Cup squad means that he is due a sabbatical away from cricket for a while once the IPL is wrapped up. Surely this will be the time for him to move down - but you never know. Cricket is a funny old game - the player averages 42 in his 5 ODIs for India so a recall is likely at some point.

Week

Jeetan Patel - 245
Morne Morkel - 182
Jonny Bairstow- 180
Glenn Maxwell - 162
Wayne Parnell - 152
Shreyas Iyer - 122
Rohit Sharma - 112
Simon Harmer - 91
Abdur Razzak - 82
Rashid Khan - 70
Jack Leach - 50
Ben Stokes - 39
Duanne Olivier - 34
Virat Kohli- 32
Shubman Gill - 27
Kane Williamson - 18
Shakib Al Hasan - 0

Mohammad Abbas - dnp
Joe Burns- dnp
Jos Buttler - dnp
Callum Ferguson - dnp
Shai Hope - dnp
Joe Root - dnp
Kuldeep Yadav- dnp

Overall

Glenn Maxwell - 2736
Virat Kohli- 1710
Shreyas Iyer - 1675
Jonny Bairstow - 1671
Rashid Khan - 1659
Joe Root- 1589
Ben Stokes - 1483
Rohit Sharma - 1449
Jos Buttler - 1381
Duanne Olivier - 1344
Simon Harmer - 1271
Jeetan Patel - 1268
Shakib Al Hasan - 1191
Kane Williamson - 1116
Kuldeep Yadav - 1022
Abdur Razzak- 898
Joe Burns - 699
Callum Ferguson - 671
Shubman Gill - 596
Wayne Parnell - 531
Morne Morkel - 502
Mohammad Abbas - 471
Shai Hope - 465
Jack Leach - 359

Headlines

Lots of low scores despite the weight of games
Top 3 changes positions yet again.
Ian up one towards the end of the table.

Week

RD - 344
MIB - 292
Ian - 245
The Professor- 122
GGAS - 120
Alviro - 152
RDJ - 116
DFM - 91
DC - 66
Sussex - 50
Arthur - 0

Overall

RD - 3238
MIB - 3120
Arthur - 2970
Sussex - 2823
The Professor- 2372
RDJ - 2242
Ian - 2190
DC - 2079
GG-AS - 2018
DFM - 1742
Andy - 1628
Alviro- 1202

[Durhamfootman]

Is it a bird, is it a plane?

good work as always from Statman Prof. A super hero if ever there was one

[Red Devil]

Wow - wasn't really expecting to do very well on this one but Maxwell and Morkel are keeping me in the mix

[The Professor]

The beauty of sport is that out of nowhere a player who has done nothing special for months can turn on a dime and defy expectation with a stellar run of form. A couple of players did that this week but the most impressive of this bunch was Wayne Parnell. The South African Kolpak player has been one of the most inactive players on our list in 2019 after being a no show in eleven of eighteen gameweeks. When he has played he has been remarkably ineffectual. He turned out once for the Sydney Sixers and once again for Islamabad in the PSL before featuring more regularly for Worcestershire in the Royal London One Day Cup. His early season form in this competition hardly set the world alight and he started this week in fifth bottom place with 531 points after a mere 8 wickets from his first 6 games. Fast forward a week and the Port Elizabeth man has got a further 12 wickets from his last three games including two fivefers and a 76 with the bat against Warwickshire. This has seen Parnell register a whopping 485 points this week and almost double his overall tally for the year to 1016. He jumps five places to 16th in the table and is just six points behind early season golden boy Kuldeep Yadav. Parnell's performances have helped propel Worcestershire into the next stage of the One Day Cup so more performances like this could very well be on the cards.

It wasn't only Wayne Parnell that showed his true class this week as two players that have had an ineffectual IPL season turned their own personal tides with some strong performances. Most notable was Shubman Gill who, after a string of very poor scores that I highlighted last week, came out with match altering performance of 76 and 65 against Mumbai and Punjab - both with pretty impressive strike rates. This will boost his abysmal average for the season which stood at 14.22 last week and is now at a slightly more respectable looking 35.87. It is notable that when he opens for Kolkata he performs markedly better than further down the order. He now has three half centuries from his last four outings in this position. This being said it has been a forgettable IPL for the young Indian and he is the lowest scoring IPL player on our list by some distance - 185 points behind teammate Kuldeep Yadav. The second player to show his true class was Kane Williamson. Ultimately one of the most gifted players in world cricket he has been hampered by poor form and has been muscled out of his own team due to the foreign player rule. Before yesterday's game against Bangalore Williamson's IPL average was 8.29 - this from a player whose T20 average is 29.76. His 70 will put a brighter shine on things but to have only scored 160 across the four games he has played this week will be a disappointment.

At the start of April when Duanne Olivier made his debut for Yorkshire against Nottinghamshire his seven wickets had fans of the White Rose salivating at the damage the Kolpak signing would inflict for their club. Since then the scintillating wicket taking that South African fans were so angry at losing out on has failed to emerge. This week Olivier played four times for Yorkshire - one more game than his fellow countryman Wayne Parnell - from this packed schedule he managed to score just 53 points and claim a solitary wicket. In fact in his one County Championship match and the five One Day Cup games he has played since debut he has claimed just four wickets. Olivier currently sits tenth in the overall table - a fairly respectable position - but a majority of his points are still made up from his outings for South Africa. Before his first game for Yorkshire he had 793 points and has gained only 604
in the month that he has been in England. In comparison to bowlers that have featured in a similar number of games in that time; Wayne Parnell has scored 868 and Jeetan Patel 803. Both of whom came with much less fanfare.

Week

Wayne Parnell - 485
Shubman Gill - 241
Glenn Maxwell - 186
Shreyas Iyer - 181
Rashid Khan - 169
Jeetan Patel - 160
Kane Williamson - 160
Morne Morkel - 152
Virat Kohli - 79
Mohammad Abbas - 58
Rohit Sharma - 56
Duanne Olivier - 53
Simon Harmer - 36
Shakib Al Hasan - 29
Callum Ferguson - 27
Joe Root- 17

Jonny Bairstow - dnp
Joe Burns- dnp
Jos Buttler - dnp
Shai Hope - dnp
Jack Leach- dnp
Abdur Razzak- dnp
Ben Stokes - dnp
Kuldeep Yadav- dnp


Overall

Glenn Maxwell - 2922
Shreyas Iyer - 1856
Rashid Khan - 1828
Virat Kohli- 1789
Jonny Bairstow - 1671
Joe Root- 1606
Rohit Sharma - 1505
Ben Stokes - 1483
Jeetan Patel - 1428
Duanne Olivier - 1397
Jos Buttler - 1381
Simon Harmer - 1307
Kane Williamson - 1276
Shakib Al Hasan - 1220
Kuldeep Yadav - 1022
Wayne Parnell - 1016
Abdur Razzak- 898
Shubman Gill - 837
Joe Burns - 699
Callum Ferguson - 698
Morne Morkel - 654
Mohammad Abbas - 529
Shai Hope - 465
Jack Leach - 359

Headlines

Huge score for Alviro lifts him off bottom spot
RD stretches lead
Sussex's highest score in eight weeks takes him to third
Ian and DC overtake RDJ

Week

Alviro - 512
RD - 338
DC - 241
Sussex - 239
The Professor- 181
GGAS - 169
Ian - 160
DFM - 94
MIB - 56
RDJ - 53
Andy - 29
Arthur - 17

Overall

RD - 3576
MIB - 3176
Sussex - 3062
Arthur - 2987
The Professor- 2553
Ian - 2350
DC - 2320
RDJ - 2295
GG-AS - 2187
DFM - 1836
Alviro- 1714
Andy - 1657