G V Joshi
A dominant Mumbai lifted their 40th Ranji Trophy title after skipper Ajit Agarkar and Dhawal Kulkarni combined to wreck Saurashtra for an innings and 125-run victory in the five-day final that ended on the third day at the Wankhede Stadium on Monday January 28, 2013.
The Ranji Trophy is a domestic first-class cricket championship played in India between different city and state sides, equivalent to the County Championship in England and the Sheffield Shield in Australia. The competition is named after Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji aka Ranji.
In the summer of 1934, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) had met at Simla, where the founder of the BCCI, Mr. A S De Mello had proposed a national championship.
In his words, “It was with something like trepidation that I submitted my proposal of a national championship to the august gathering, and also laid before the meeting, an artist’s drawing of the proposed trophy, a Grecian urn 60 centimetres in height, with a lid, the handle of which represented Father Time.”
The then Maharajah of Patiala, Bhupendra Singh, jumped up and claimed the honour and privilege of perpetuating the name of the great Ranjitsinhji, who had passed away in 1933.
He offered a gold cup of the magnificent design submitted by De Mello valued at then 500 pounds, to be called the Ranji Trophy. He also agreed to present a miniature trophy, which would become the memento of the winning team. Every year since then, the House of Patiala has presented the miniature.
Mumbai (formerly Bombay) have been the dominant team in the Championship so far, with 40wins.
Some of the teams which played in the Ranji Trophy represented princely states of India in preindependence days viz., Holkar and Baroda. As of today, most of the teams playing in the Ranji Trophy represent states of India.
However, there are teams that represent individual cities such as Mumbai or Hyderabad or regions such as Vidharba. The competition also includes teams that have no regional affiliations, such as Railways and Services.
Cricket is a bat-and-ball team sport that is first documented as being played in southern England in the 16th century.
Today, the sport is played in more than 100 countries. The rules of the game are known as the Laws of Cricket These are maintained by the International Cricket Council (ICC), the governing body of cricket, and the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), the club that has been the guardian of the Laws since it was founded in 1787.
The game of cricket came to India along with many other good things like Railways and Telegraph that the English brought to India. English army and civilian employees of the East India Company (EIC) brought cricket to India. They used to play cricket in Calcutta and Madras in the 1720s.
The earliest record of cricket in India goes back to 1721, when English merchants played a game at Cambay, Gujarat. Army regiments of EIC used to play cricket matches among themselves in 18th and 19th centuries at their Regimental Centres scattered throughout the country.
It was in the middle of 19th century that Madras Presidency and Calcutta (now Kolkata) Presidency played against each other in the first competitive matches in India. However, the game was still a monopoly of English.
Parsees of Mumbai were the first to take to cricket. The Orient Cricket Club, at the Esplanade Maidan at Bombay, formed in 1848, by them was the first cricket club In India. The Orient Club was the first club to tour England 1886. They played 28 matches and won only one of them.
A team led by George Vernon in 1889- 90 played 11 matches in India where they won 8, drew 2 and lost one match, ironically to the Parsees. Lord Harris, some time captain of England and Governor of then Bombay (now Mumbai) Presidency between 1890 and 1895 helped to popularise the game and changed the sporting ethos of a city-and then that of a nation.
The first regular cricket contest in India which was started in 1892, was the annual series of matches between the Parsees and the Europeans, Each year, two matches, one each in Mumbai and the other in Pune were played. From 1907 to 1911, the tournament became a triangular affair when Hindus joined in.
The contest then became quadrangular with the entry of Mohammedans in 1912. A fifth team, The Rest, was added in 1937 and the tournament became the Bombay Pentagular. The tournament was abandoned in 1945, following an agitation by Mahatma Gandhi on the ground that it had a communal character.
Another man, who showed the way, was Ranji (K.S. Ranjitsinhji,) later to be Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, a state in Saurashtra region of Gujarat.
He played little cricket in India; though he did play, some cricket for the House of Patiala’s XI and led a Jamnagar team occasionally until 1915.
However, it is his achievements in England and Australia, for Sussex and England that made Indians think that they too could play the game better than its founders could.
To accomplish that, competitive tournament cricket was essential. As mentioned earlier, a national cricket championship was proposed early in 1934 by A S de Mello.
And thus was born Ranji Trophy, the competition for an English game, a tournament named after Ranji, who, with “a flick of the wrist sent the ball to the leg boundary” or leaned into the ball and sent it to the boundary “with the speed of thought”.
The first Ranji Trophy match in history took place at Chepauk, Madras, barely six months after it was suggested and adopted.
What Lord Harris started has kept growing in Mumbai – India’s most forward-looking metropolis. The Bombay Cricket Association today has 350 registered clubs playing in about 80 official tournaments in a year. The game is played from grassroots level in the city and suburbs and develops in the schools, colleges and clubs.
The North, East and South with what Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore can now offer, may be catching up. However, cricket is still not a way of life there as it is in Mumbai.
Even the Mumbai cricketer, however, would not be where he is today without the tournament that makes Indian cricket tick.
The Ranji Trophy, now in the eighth decade, is the award that every Indian ‘state’ team wants to win. And to play for those teams is every Indian cricketer’s first dream.
It is from this first step that cricket players like Kapil Dev, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Mahendar Singh Dhoni and the like have blossomed to achieve the next step – to represent India in International Cricket.
However, there are many who have played in Ranji trophy matches, established records in batting and bowling, but never made it to the India team.
Many of them play in English county clubs. A cricket match has been used to settle some administrative problems like imposing taxes as shown in the movie Lagan. It was based on a true incident in one of the British colonies. (PTI)
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