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, with the awards ceremony on grand final day — top batter, top bowler and top fielder or wicket-keeper in each of the eight bands
- Scoring
- Live, ball by ball, in the VECL app
- Watch
- Every match streamed live on YouTube and Facebook
Registration to presentation
The same shape the Melbourne league has run since 2024.
Register and pay
You register the player on this site 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 in late April, and the awards ceremony on grand final day.
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
The league so far
The Victorian Elite Cricket League has played turf T20 in Melbourne since December 2024, across three franchises: more than 500 players, more than 200 matches on turf and more than 30,000 runs — with proper selection panels and a presentation night at the end of each tournament.
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, but it is not a scaled-down version of the idea.
A road that runs both ways
Elite already tours between Melbourne and Chennai. Two selectors from the Melbourne league fly to Chennai in December to sit on the selection panel here.
Two players bound for Melbourne
We intend to select two players from every age band in Season 1 — 10 to 15 players in all — to play in the VECL Melbourne tournament in December 2027. The league covers their accommodation, their match fees and an Elite staff member who travels with them; the family covers flights, visa and spending money. It is an intention rather than a guarantee, confirmed once the season is under way — and travel depends on a visa being granted, which is not ours to decide.
₹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.