Howdy folks.. welcome back here for the first time since Covid. Although I did run a spin-off of this league for a brief while without properly calculating the amount of work required which had me basically creating 12 different squads in the sim every single round, which can only be sustainable for so long.. Nevertheless, I took my time to get back here with a different idea that could do this league justice for it's 12th season (how time flies ) incidentally 12 years after I started this league, and one which doesn't require me to take on a ridiculous workload either.So, let's get to it.. Legends At Battle XII will feature (hopefully 12?) teams with no national restrictions à la Season XI where any players who have played an official cricket match or unofficial associate level match since Test cricket's start year 1877 are eligible for selection. There will be some minor restrictions on player selection however, so we don't end up having squads featuring only the Bradmans, Barneses and Headleys etc, which would make things a bit one-dimensional for a 50-over tournament with no disrespect to those players. Each squad will contain 18 players with the following criteria:
- A minimum of 5 all-format specialists (Test, ODI & T20I capped; eg Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers, Chris Gayle, Rohit Sharma etc)
- A minimum of 3 T20 specialists i.e players that have placed at least twice the number of T20 matches (international/domestic) as compared to other international formats combined (eg Andre Russell, Dwayne Bravo, Rashid Khan, Will Jacks etc)
- A minimum of 3 Test specialists. As the name suggests, this criteria means players who have only played Test cricket at international level and no ODIs/T20Is, which allows you to either select players from pre-ODI eras dating back to 1877 (eg Don Bradman, Sydney Barnes, Wally Hammond etc) to even more recent cases such as Mark Butcher for instance.
- A minimum of 3 associate legends.. This means players from associate countries that do not have Test status, or players that represented pre-Test status Ireland/Afghanistan/Zimbabwe/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). Here you have the freedom to select players irrespective of what format they played from any era starting from 1877 to present (eg Steve Tikolo, Ryan ten Doeschate, Bart King). I have even allowed players who have only played unofficial fixtures so as to allow certain gun players that never played first-class cricket back in the old days due to their country of origin not being interested to dabble for various reasons such as Canada's legendary Jack Laing of the 1890s, or even the likes of Friedrich Rincker, Arie Terwiel from the Netherlands, Felix Menzel from Nazi Germany etc.
- The remaining 4 players can be any of your choice regardless of which formats they played, including internationally capped or non-capped players. This also gives you the opportunity to get in some quality Test & ODI only picks from the pre-T20 era (eg Viv Richards, Dennis Lillee, Michael Bevan, Malcolm Marshall etc)
- There are no lineup restrictions save for the customary wicket-keeper in your XI, and at least 16 of your 18 squad members including at least 2 associates/T20 specialists getting a game at the very least.
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