Make sure you have all the animated models you need or the means to create them, that can be a big chunk of your work.
Decide early how realistic you want the simulation to be - if you want very realistic ball spin, swing, wicket conditions and bat/ball contact in 3D then you’ll need a physics engine for sure, but might need to do a good bit of work yourselves in that area to get it realistic.
5 people for one year is enough time to get something done, of course you have to have realistic expectations. You shouldn’t need any great expenses as there are free engines and tools out there that do a great job. An exception would be the 3D models - if you want quality you need someone talented in that area and I don’t think you’ll find much cricket stuff off the shelf. But ideally one or two of you, or someone else on the campus might have those skills.
There are a number of free engine sources, both in Java (as kapta listed) and otherwise.
I agree with writing some simple games first, to get a feel for the full process. Maybe some cricket based prototypes which would get you thinking about how to structure things.
eg. you could do a none-graphical game which just keeps track of the players, score and stats with random calculations for what happens on each delivery. Then build it up to include different field settings with some weighting for how that works with different bowlers etc.
So you will end up with a basic cricket captain type game, a feel for making a game, and it will get you thinking about how the final game is going to look (there are always things you don’t think about till you actually make a prototype). You could also extend it to multiplayer, to prototype whatever networking you use.
If you plan to have a game that persists for more than one match (eg. tournaments or seasons), then you could write a separate prototype which deals with that - just random results for the match and score, but get some practice in putting an interface together, dealing with fixtures and tables, injuries, weather etc.
