THE MATCHLESS "RANJI"

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 7, 23 January 1937, Page 14

THE MATCHLESS "RANJI"

MEMORIES OF BATTING GENIUS ENTIRELY ORIGINAL BATSMAN APFraOAHON BY "CRICKErER"

"Cticketers wiU never see the- like of Ranjitsinhji ; he was entirely original, and there is nothing in all the history and development of batsmanship with which. we can compare him, His ftyle was a remarkahie instance of the way a%man can express pcraonai genius in a game-™ nay, not only .a personal genius, but the genius of a whole race,"— "Cricheter," in the Manchester. Guaardian,

"For Ranjitsingji's cricket was of his own country; when ht batted a strange iight was seen for the first time on Enilish field*, a Iight out of the East It was lovtly magie, and not preparsd for by anything that had happened in cricket before Ranji carae to us," adds "Cricketer." "In the nineties the game was absolutely English, it was even Victoriau, ,W. G. Gract for years had stamped the English mark on cricket and the mark of the period. It ./as the age of simple first principles, of the stout respectability of straight bat and good-iength baii; the flavours everywhert were John Bull's, And then suddeniy this visitation of - dusky, suppie legerdemain happened; a man was «een playing cricket as nobody horn in England could possibjy have played ih ' 'The hontest length ball was not met by the honest straight bat, but there was a fiick of the wipst, and loi the straight ball was charmed away to the leg boundary. And nobody quite saw or understood how it ail happened. Bowlers stood transflxed and possibiy they orossed themselves, "Never a Christian Stroke." T onee asked Ted Wainwright, ihe Yorkshire cricketer, what he thought of Ranji, and Wainwright said, 'Ranji, he never made a Christian stroke in his life.' Why should he have done? The style is the man, and Ranji belonged to the land of Hazlitt's Indian jugglers, where beauty is subtle and not plain and unambiguous, . "Marvellous game of cricket that can give us a W. G.* Grace, English as a Gloucester tree, and . Geopge Hirst, Yorkshire as a broad mooy, and Ranji as true to his'racial psychology as any of them! "The game has Jcnown no greater spectacle than that of C. B. Fry and Ranji, as they made a great stand for Sussex. Ranji always batted second wicket down, and thereby hangs a

tala—and again the teller of it is Ted Wainwright. "'Ranji and Fry,' he used to murmur as memory moved in him, 'every year it were the same old story. We used to go down to Brighton with the sun shining and the ground hard as iron. And Sussex allus won the toss. And we all went on the field and gtarted bowlin' and, gure enough we'd get Vine out and the score-bqara would say twenty for one, And then George Hirst would get Killjek out quick, and we all on us said, "Come on, Yorkshire, we're going grand; Sussex 31 for two." ' Wainwright paused here ta his narrative, and after a while he would add, 'But, bless you, we knowed there were nowt in it. Close of play, Sussex three hundred and ninety for two, and the same owd tale every year.' Heart-Breaking Problem. "Bowlers have never known a problem so heart-breaking as the problem of Fry and Ranji on a perfect Brighton wicket. Happy the man who today can close his eyes and see again th# vision of Ranji, his rippling shirt pf silk, his bat like a yielding caiie making swift movements which cirded round those incomparable wrists. "He is to-day a legend. Modern lovers of the game, jealous of their own heroes, will, no doubt, tell us that Ranji, like all the old masters, was a creation of our fancy in a world oldfashioned and young. We who saw him will keep silence as the sceptics commlt their blasphemy. We have seen what we have seen. We ■can feel the spell yet, we can go back in our minds to hot days in an England of forgotten peace and plenty, days when Ranji did not so much as fat foy us as enchant us, bowlers and all, in a way all his own, so that when at last he got out we were as though suddeniy awakened from a dream. It was more than a cricketer and more than a game that did it for us,"