Cricket: My Dream Team

Cricket is most popular in this region, South Asia. Out of ten ICC members, four belong to this sub-continent, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka & Bangladesh. The popularity resulted successful arrangement of ICC World Cup.

Peoples are mostly passionate to cricket. Each and every people have their own choices; raise their voice to explain good or bad, reason behind loosing and so on. Even if when our country gets them out of tournament, we don’t leave cricket. We always try to support better performers except it goes against own country.

Cricket is a game which needs competent performance in three departments, batting, bowling & fielding. The reality is everyone can’t give his best effort every day. Thus both in batting, performance of two/three are must. But in bowling it’s almost impossible to do it for one or two as at least five bowlers are to be used. Thus everyone have to perform or be replaced by other. Considering these all, I tried to select the best 11 combination for one-day international match. They are:

1. Hashim Amla
2. Tillakaratne Dilshan
3. Kumar Sangakkara
4. Jonathan Trott
5. AB de Villiers
6. Yuvraj Singh
7. Shahid Afridi
8. Dale Steyn
9. Lasith Malinga
10. Zaheer Khan
11. Muttiah Muralitharan

It was difficult to choose the best player for opening the innings as almost every country has great players for this position. Most competent includes Schachin Tendulkar, living legend of cricket, & Virendra Shewag of India, Andrew Strauss of England, Criss Gyle of West Indies, Graeme Smith & Hashim Amla of South Africa, Upal Tharanga & Tilkarotne Dilshan of Sri Lanka and Jesse Ryder of New Zealand. Most of them are technically sound and aggressive in the very beginning of the innings. But only two player is to be selected to start the inning. With due respect to all other, I would like to select Dilshan and Amla. Dilshan is aggressive from the very beginning where and Amla is silent killer. Sangakara, who will be at three, is a player with great adjusting capacity. In case of any accident, early break, he can take the lead to build the partnership, build the innings accordingly. He has proved it for many times, finally in the world cup championship. Trot is in form middle order batsman who will be there right after Sangakara and will re-building the innings in case of early damage. These two would be followed by De Villiers who is naturally attacking batsman but with the ability to handle crisis & increase run-rate simultaneously. Yuvraj Sing is a high quality finisher. He showed it for many times during his career for India. He can get himself into the flow nicely. While chasing, his finishing touch is really tremendous. When Afridi is at seven, it seems to be something different and unpredictable.

The counter part of batting is nothing but bowling. The bowling is supposed to be started by Dale Steyn who attacks from the very beginning. Many cricket analysts consider Dale Steyne as the most aggressive bowler of recent time. Zahir Khan has proved himself as an economic bowler in this world cup (2011) which contributed to win the World Cup Championship. Being economy from one end and aggressive from the other end will create pressure for the opponent’s batsman. Such pressure can lead to damage anytime. After these, when Murali will join, hopefully it’s going to be disaster from the batting view point. Malinga will be waiting for the old ball with which he will continuously throwing yorker length which is his specialty. All these are about pace attack. Afridi will add more value in spin attack. Despite of being popular, he proved his ability of bowling once more in the world cup 2011. Though Yuvraj and Dilshan is specialist batsman, they used to bowl almost every match and picks wicket which would be an added advantage regarding change of bowling, looking for partnership break or check run. With this combination, captain would not have to bother about the pitch-whether it’s spinning or bouncing.

Let’s come to the field planning. This team consists of many extra ordinary fielders which includes De Villiers, Amla, Yuvraj and Dilshan around the wicket. Sangakara is very keen behind stumps. Villiers has set himself as specialized fielder at point. Amla, Dilshan and Yuvraj will protect other important positions like backward point, mid-off and square leg while Trott will be protecting mid-on. Batsman will be looking for place to pass the ball through these positions. Creating constraints through high quality fielders, bowlers could go for their aggression and keep runs checked.


After all, cricket is to play on field and captain has to handle the bowling and field positioning efficiently. No doubt, Sangakara has the capacity to do so. With the combination of all these special players, hopefully batsman will be able to run for 350+ and bowlers will be able to bowl out opponent within 200.


Photo Source: http://www.espncricinfo.com/