For the most part, cricket minded its own business, except when it came to tennis. Though the game of bat and ball was far removed from the racquet-wielding sport, it did play “a role in how modern tennis evolved in the UK,” shares author and sports historian Anindya Dutta. In the late 1800s, the sub-committee of the Marylebone Cricket Club, the most important sports governing body of the time, had decided on the shape and form of the tennis court, opting for a “rectangular” one over the “hourglass shape” by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, who is also credited with designing the boxed lawn tennis set in 1874. “Interestingly, it was one of the sub-committee members who came up with the modern tennis ball. Since the vulcanised rubber ball would become wet in the English weather, he asked his wife to cover one in white flannel. That is the ball still in use,” says Dutta.

Closer home in India—then a jewel in the English crown—the two sports stayed out of each other’s hair. “Its rapid expansion [in India] was entirely due to the British civil servants and their families who brought the game to their clubs, from where it gained its popularity.”