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Here is an exercise some of you may find interesting - select an all-time XI of a country (or more) of your choice.
ESPNCricinfo went through such an exercise some months ago, and came up w/ the following teams for each country here
My exercise here is slightly different - I'll ask you to select all time Test XIs and all time 50-50 XIs. To make it more challenging, here are some rules:
Australia Victor Trumper | Arthur Morris | Don Bradman | Greg Chappell | Allan Border | Keith Miller | Adam Gilchrist | Shane Warne | Bill O'Reilly | Dennis Lillee | Glenn McGrath
England Jack Hobbs | Len Hutton | Wally Hammond | Ken Barrington | Kevin Pietersen | Ian Botham | Alan Knott | Harold Larwood | Derek Underwood | Fred Trueman | Sydney Barnes
India Virender Sehwag | Sunil Gavaskar | Rahul Dravid | Sachin Tendulkar | Vijay Hazare | Vinoo Mankad | MS Dhoni | Kapil Dev | Anil Kumble | Javagal Srinath | Erapalli Prasanna
New Zealand Glenn Turner | Stewie Dempster | Bert Sutcliffe | Martin Crowe | Martin Donnelly | John R Reid | Richard Hadlee | Daniel Vettori | Ian Smith | Shane Bond | Jack Cowie
Pakistan Saeed Anwar | Hanif Mohammad | Zaheer Abbas | Javed Miandad | Inzamam-ul-Haq | Imran Khan | Rashid Latif | Wasim Akram | Fazal Mahmood | Abdul Qadir | Waqar Younis
South Africa Barry Richards | Graeme Smith | Jacques Kallis | Graeme Pollock | Dudley Nourse | Aubrey Faulkner | Shaun Pollock | Mike Procter | John Waite | Hugh Tayfield | Allan Donald
Sri Lanka Marvan Atapattu | Sanath Jayasuriya | Kumar Sangakkara | Aravinda de Silva | Mahela Jayawardene | Arjuna Ranatunga | Chaminda Vaas | Rumesh Ratnayake | Ashantha de Mel | Somachandra de Silva | Muttiah Muralitharan
West Indies Gordon Greenidge | Conrad Hunte | George Headley | Viv Richards | Brian Lara | Garry Sobers | Malcolm Marshall | Jackie Hendriks | Michael Holding | Curtly Ambrose | Lance Gibbs
Note that the above are just test teams comprising the best XI of every country (in the opinion of the different Cricinfo panels). But for this exercise, you'd need to sort them into test & ODI teams, and add a few more to complete both teams.
In the above exercise, I deliberately avoided asking one to make an all time test or ODI XI, as that would be too varied, and also, I'd prefer to avoid flames over whether players of one country should be preferred over another. So just stick to doing this for your favorite country, or countries.
Have fun
ESPNCricinfo went through such an exercise some months ago, and came up w/ the following teams for each country here
My exercise here is slightly different - I'll ask you to select all time Test XIs and all time 50-50 XIs. To make it more challenging, here are some rules:
- If you select a player for the test team, the same player cannot be selected for the ODI side. Just imagine that the country is playing 2 matches - one against one test team, and another against another ODI team. In other words, if you put Sachin in your ODI team, you can't have him in the test team as well
- Any player selected for a side has to have played at least one game in that particular format. In other words, you cannot select Sir Gary Sobers or Sir Len Hutton in a one day side, and you cannot select - as of now - Cheteshwar Pujara in an ODI side
- If a particular player - like Kepler Wessels - played for more than one country, he can only be included in the country he last played for.
Australia Victor Trumper | Arthur Morris | Don Bradman | Greg Chappell | Allan Border | Keith Miller | Adam Gilchrist | Shane Warne | Bill O'Reilly | Dennis Lillee | Glenn McGrath
England Jack Hobbs | Len Hutton | Wally Hammond | Ken Barrington | Kevin Pietersen | Ian Botham | Alan Knott | Harold Larwood | Derek Underwood | Fred Trueman | Sydney Barnes
India Virender Sehwag | Sunil Gavaskar | Rahul Dravid | Sachin Tendulkar | Vijay Hazare | Vinoo Mankad | MS Dhoni | Kapil Dev | Anil Kumble | Javagal Srinath | Erapalli Prasanna
New Zealand Glenn Turner | Stewie Dempster | Bert Sutcliffe | Martin Crowe | Martin Donnelly | John R Reid | Richard Hadlee | Daniel Vettori | Ian Smith | Shane Bond | Jack Cowie
Pakistan Saeed Anwar | Hanif Mohammad | Zaheer Abbas | Javed Miandad | Inzamam-ul-Haq | Imran Khan | Rashid Latif | Wasim Akram | Fazal Mahmood | Abdul Qadir | Waqar Younis
South Africa Barry Richards | Graeme Smith | Jacques Kallis | Graeme Pollock | Dudley Nourse | Aubrey Faulkner | Shaun Pollock | Mike Procter | John Waite | Hugh Tayfield | Allan Donald
Sri Lanka Marvan Atapattu | Sanath Jayasuriya | Kumar Sangakkara | Aravinda de Silva | Mahela Jayawardene | Arjuna Ranatunga | Chaminda Vaas | Rumesh Ratnayake | Ashantha de Mel | Somachandra de Silva | Muttiah Muralitharan
West Indies Gordon Greenidge | Conrad Hunte | George Headley | Viv Richards | Brian Lara | Garry Sobers | Malcolm Marshall | Jackie Hendriks | Michael Holding | Curtly Ambrose | Lance Gibbs
Note that the above are just test teams comprising the best XI of every country (in the opinion of the different Cricinfo panels). But for this exercise, you'd need to sort them into test & ODI teams, and add a few more to complete both teams.
In the above exercise, I deliberately avoided asking one to make an all time test or ODI XI, as that would be too varied, and also, I'd prefer to avoid flames over whether players of one country should be preferred over another. So just stick to doing this for your favorite country, or countries.
Have fun
Anupamaa
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