The premise developed from a BBC tweet challenging people to come up with the best possible cricket xi whose batting order was also alphabetical. I first decided to try and come up with an xi of people whose surname began with A. When that proved rather easy I moved onto B. About an hour later I had compiled 24 separate teams. X was out of the question and I merged Q and Z for lack of viable options.
That should have been enough to satisfy any cricket obsessive, but I decided I wanted to see these teams in action, or as close to action as was possible for a set of teams whose rosters included several dead men.
I booted up Cricket Captain 2019 and set up a custom game, selecting the teams that I had chosen for A and B and pitting them against each other in a 5-day game. I simulated the game and examined the scorecard. It was bizarrely compelling.
A thought occured.
Why not work out which letter reigns supreme, once and for all?
Rather than actually answering that hypothetical question, thereby convincing myself of the pointlessness of the exercise and forcing myself to give up completely, I decided to put together a tournament. Three groups of 8 play a single round-robin, and the 8 best placed teams across the groups would progress to quarter finals. I used a points format not unlike but also not entirely similar to that used in the county championship.
Still steadfastly avoiding the impulse to ask myself exactly why the hell I was doing this, I set to work fastidiously recording every scorecard in the spreadsheet below, while taking screenshots of the scorecards that the game produced. All the information, from line-ups to group tables to batting stats, can be found in the following links:
Hopefully the above links work. The scorecards file is preposterously large, verging on 1gb, so I can only hope it successfully uploaded to dropbox.
I have no idea why I put this together, but if any of you gain anything from viewing it then I suppose it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
The Tragic Grasshopper Cricket Blog 