Selecting a balanced playing XI in the game of cricket with the right mix of players of different specialization is a difficult decision making problem for the team management. To make the process more objective, optimization techniques can be applied to the process of selection of players from a given squad. Such an exercise has two dimensions. First, a suitable tool for performance measurement of cricketers needs to be defined. Secondly, for selecting a balanced team of XI players, an appropriate objective function and some constraints need to be formulated. Since the captain gets an obvious inclusion in the cricket team, the area specialization of the captain influences the selection of other ten positions in the playing XI. This study attempts to select the optimum balanced playing XI from a squad of players given the specialization of the captain using binary integer programming. To validate the exercise, data from the fifth season of the Indian Premier League has been used.