The Fascination with Cricket XI teams: The Best Cricket team ever or simply someone’s personal choice
Cricket fans all over the world love to come up with their own best of cricket teams. They have come up with the best post World War II team, the best English team, the best batting team and so on. Fans no matter what team they actually support, it seems
they have a love for great players no matter what country they come from. Recently ESPN Cricinfo, released their all time great Cricket XI teams to the world and instantly debates started to flourish. It is a very personal choice to make when selecting the
best players to be included in a mythical team but people have and always will try to get it right.
The World XI is a mythical team that a lot of fans and players like to theorise about. They like to add their own players into it according to how well the players have performed in their careers. There is another World XI team though and this one is real.
It is the World ODI XI and it is the best current ODI players who have made up a team and play against other teams in exhibition matches.
Cricket fans have a love affair with designing their own teams of the best players in their minds. It is something akin to Fantasy Football but it is not a competition, it is simply fans getting together and creating their own best of teams. It is interesting
how players get chosen for these teams because every player, even if in form, will get picked just because someone likes them and does not like another player. Over the years people have tried to come up with one single greatest mythical team of players which
would be the best and most unstoppable team to ever play the game but they always came up short because of personal bias. Recently the guys over at Cricinfo have decided to make a systematic analysis of the greatest players and then set a criteria on who they
think should make the cut or not.
Crincinfo employed a jury of cricket enthusiasts to pick who they thought was the World XI. They also picked a Second XI of the runners up and also a Reader’s XI. Each player was given a score by the jury after hours of deliberation and the players with
the highest scores made it into the World XI. The remaining few made it into the Second XI and then readers of the famous blog were invited to send in their recommendations and these were turned into the Reader’s XI. The World XI that the website chose looks
like this: Jack Hobbs, Len Hutton, Don Bradman, Sachin Tendulkar, Viv Richards, Gary Sobers, Adam Gilchrist, Malcolm Marshall, Shane Warne, Wasim Akram and Dennis Lillee.
The choices are very interesting and a lot of people might have felt that their favourite player was left out but that is how it looks at the moment. Some younger fans may not have even heard of some of the players on the list but those players are included
in it for a reason. The way the players were picked was that the all-time great players were picked from the best test teams of the moment. Then each country had a country XI team and then out of those teams, the best players were chosen to make it to the
World XI.
The interesting thing to think about at this point is what if this team could actually be formed today. The best ODI players in the world do make it to the real World XI team that plays exhibition matches against other best of teams, but if a team such as
Cricinfo’s could be made, would any current team be able to beat it? This question cannot be answered because of its hypothetical nature but it would be a great contest if it could actually take place.
Fans of cricket will continue to pour over player’s stats and analyse every nuance and aspect of a player’s game for all time. They will continue to come up with their own best of teams and their own World XI teams and keep debating their choices with other
fans. This is the nature of cricket; it is loved for numerous different reasons and many fans like different players for all kinds of reasons.
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