Everyone is now aware that there is little tangible benefit to your club to produce a cricketer for the National team. Ireland now play so many fixtures during the course of the summer that the International players rarely play for your club. Therefore the impact they can make in League and Cup is now greatly diminished. On the plus side there is the prestige of producing a player for your country and this in turn may attract better players to your club as its raises the profile of your team.

However to reflect the fact that these players now make a much lesser impact than previously I wanted to produce some analysis of the most effective batsmen playing club cricket. To do this I wanted to analyse the performances of players who turn out for their clubs week in and week out and produce decent performances. I have not excluded the International players from the tables but because of unavailability their ranking points are not sufficient to merit a place on the table.

In producing the rankings I applied a formula that would take into account aggregate runs, batting averages, availability to the team, innings where you were not dismissed and gave bonuses to players who scored Fifties and/or Hundreds. The rankings are easily updated from the NCU statistics from the Cricket Europe Ireland site and therefore can be an up to date reflection of a players performances. To enable me to produce an immediate ranking I would encourage all clubs to submit their scorecards online.

I will update these over the summer and will also produce Bowling Rankings on an ongoing basis as well as Batting and Bowling rankings for Section 2. For those players who do not have an aggregate for Section 1 eg Woodvale and Ballymena players, I will wait until someone has completed 5 innings' before they are placed on the 'ladder'. I have included Overseas Professionals on the ladder but only those who are playing their cricket in Section 1 in 2009.

1 G Strydom Lisburn 2075
2 Ry Haire North Down 1522
3 J Mongomery North Down 1509
4 N Jones CSNI 1503
5 D Heasley CIYMS 1378
6 T Khan North Down 1323
7 J Shannon Inst 1241
8 M Hutchinson Bangor 1218
9 B Cooper CIYMS 1187
10 Y Tillekaratne Bangor 1175
11 L Nelson W'town 1134
12 W Horwood CSNI 1105
13 R West CSNI 1072
14 A Cowden Carrick 1069
15 J Hewitt CIYMS 1062
16 A Sutherland North Down 1045
17 G McKee CSNI 1040
18= J Hall W'town 1030
18= G Thompson Lisburn 1030
20 R Eagleson Carrick 1005