A franchise league, not a knockout
Every player who is selected gets a season, not a weekend.
- Competition
- Franchise T20, four league-owned clubs
- Age bands
- U12 · U14 · U16 · U18 · Senior
- Girls' bands
- Girls U14 · Girls U18 · Women
- Season
- Sunday 10 January to Sunday 25 April 2027
- Playing days
- Sundays — start between 8am and 10am, play through to about 6.30pm. Match times confirmed each round.
- Where
- Chennai — the ground is being contracted and is not named until it is signed
- Finals
- 18 and 25 April 2027, followed by presentation day
- Scoring
- Live, ball by ball, in the VECL app
- Watch
- Every match telecast live on YouTube, Facebook and our own channels
Registration to presentation
The same shape the Melbourne league has run since 2024.
Register and pay
You register the player in the app and pay the ₹250 team selection fee in the same step. The registration is complete once that fee is paid, and not before.
Team selection day
Every registered player gets a Sunday morning in front of the selection panel — batting, bowling and fielding, watched and scored. Turning up is what makes a player trialled.
The draft
The panel picks the squads and drafts players across the four clubs, balancing them so no club is stacked. Families do not choose a club, and neither do we take requests — that is what makes the competition worth winning.
The season
Sundays from January to April, scored live, with two spare Sundays built into the calendar to absorb weather. Finals and presentation in late April.
Eight bands, and what happens if one is thin
A band needs enough registered players to make a real competition across four clubs. Each open band is measured against a threshold of 60 registrations before the draft, and the position is reviewed openly as registrations come in. A band that falls short is merged upward or held over to the next season — nobody is left in a two-team competition pretending to be a league.
If a band the player registered for does not run, you will hear it from us directly rather than finding out on a fixture list.
The girls' bands run to a lower threshold. Girls U14, Girls U18 and Women are a competition of their own, not a few places inside a boys' team, and they are starting from nothing — so holding them to a number set for an established band would cut every one of them in the first season and leave no girls' cricket at all. They are measured against 30 rather than 60, which is enough to field real squads and play a real season.
They are also deliberately wide. Three bands spanning more years each can be filled properly in a first season where five narrow ones would spread thin and fail together. As the numbers grow, the bands narrow.
One league, two cities
Six tournaments in Victoria
The Victorian Elite Cricket League has run six turf-wicket T20 tournaments since December 2024, three a year, across three franchises and more than 400 players — with proper selection panels and a presentation night at the end of each one.
The same standard here
Chennai Season 1 runs the same format, the same live scoring and the same selection discipline. It is a first season, so it is four clubs rather than eight — but it is not a scaled-down version of the idea.
A road that runs both ways
Elite already tours between Melbourne and Chennai, including fixtures against Tamil Nadu junior development sides. Players on both sides get more cricket worth travelling for.
₹250 per player
- What it buys
- Paid when you submit the form. It buys the player a place in team selection: the ground, the officials and the panel's time on their selection day. The registration is not complete until it is paid.
- Refunds
- The fee is not refundable, including if the player is not selected. The one exception is a selection day or a season that VECL cancels — see Policies.