THE MATCHLESS “RANJI”

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 19, 23 January 1937, Page 11 (Supplement)

THE MATCHLESS “RANJI”

MEMORIES OF BATTING GENIUS ENTIRELY ORIGINAL BATSMAN APPRECIATION BY “CRICKETER” * ‘Cricketers will never see the like of Ranjitsinh ji; he was entirely original, and there is nothing in all the history and development of batsmanship with which we can compare him. His style was a remarkable instance of the way a man can express personal genius in a game—nay, not only a personal genius, but the genius of a whole race.”— “ Cricketer/* in the Manchester Guaardian.

“For Ranjitsingji’s cricket was of his own country; when he batted a strange light was seen for the first time on English fields, a light out of the East. It was lovely magic, and not prepared for by anything that had happened in cricket before Ranji came to us,” adds “Cricketer.” “In the nineties the game was absolutely English, it was even Victorian. W. G. Grace for years had stamped the English mark on cricket and the mark of the period. It was the age of simple first principles, of the stout respectability of straight bat and good-length ball; the flavours everywhere were John Bull’s. And then suddenly this visitation of dusky, supple legerdemain happened; a man was seen playing cricket as nobody bom in England could possibly have played it. “The hontest length ball was not met by the honest straight bat, but there was a flick of the wrist, and lo! the straight ball was charmed away to the leg boundary. And nobody quite saw or understood how It all happened. Bowlers stood transfixed and oossibly they crossed themselves. ‘‘Never a Christian Stroke.” “I once asked Ted Wainwright, the Yorkshire cricketer, what he thought of Ranji, and Wain wright 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 George Hirst, Yorkshire as a broad moor, and Ranji as true to his racial psychology as any of them! “The game has known 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

tale —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 qjid the ground hard as iron. And Sussex alius won the toss. And we all went on the field and started bowlin’ and, sure enough we’d get Vine out and the score-board would say twenty for one. And then George Hirst would get Killick out quick, and we all on us said, “Come on, Yorkshire, we’re going grand; Sussex 31 for two.” ’ Wainwright paused here in 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 the vision of Ranji, his rippling shirt of silk, his bat like a yielding cane making swift movements which circled 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 commit 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 sd much as fat for 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 suddenly awakened from a dream. It was more than a cricketer and more than a game that did it for us.”