Princely patronage built Indian cricket and warped it

Rulers who funded teams before independence gave the game money, grounds and a selection culture it took decades to shed.

Before there was a board with real authority, there were princes with grounds. A ruler would maintain a team, employ professionals on his staff, build a pitch, fund tours, and captain the side himself regardless of whether he could bat.

That last clause is where the trouble sat.

The money was real and so was the benefit. Talented players from poor families got employment, coaching and a place to play, which no institution in the country was otherwise offering. Grounds were built that are still in use. Touring sides were hosted at a standard that made international cricket in India viable long before the sport had any commercial base. Strip the patrons out of the story and there is no early Indian cricket to speak of.

What came with the money was a selection culture in which the highest place in the team was a matter of status. Captaincy in particular was treated as an honour attached to rank rather than a job requiring judgment, and the early years of Indian Test cricket contain a run of appointments and disputes that make no sense unless you understand that the argument was about precedence between courts, not about who read a pitch well.

The habit outlived the patrons. Regional balance in selection, the political weight of state associations, the idea that a captain's authority derives from something other than performance: those did not arrive with television money, they were inherited. Anyone who watched Indian cricket administration in the decades after independence saw a board where the votes were distributed by geography and influence, and the shape of that is recognisably descended from a system where each ground had an owner.

The transition took a long time and it was not completed by a reform. It was completed by money arriving from somewhere else. Once broadcast revenue and then a franchise league made the sport commercially enormous, patronage stopped being the deciding force, because no individual could outspend the market.

I would resist the tidy conclusion that the princes were simply a problem to be outgrown. They funded a sport nobody else would fund, in a country where the alternative was no cricket at all.

They just funded it on terms that put themselves at the top of the scorecard.