Shah Mardan Shah, the Pir of Pagara who died in London on Tuesday was not just another political figure, a maverick or a spiritual leader but a personality with special interest in sports and in sportsmen, a rare quality of which many in this country have no knowledge of or very little if any.

Cricket was his first love in younger days and horse-racing his passion, and it was because of that he served as the President of the Karachi Turf Club with distinction.

Cricket, I believe, he started to learn at school in Liverpool and in Pinner in Middlesex where he and his brother were moved after the British hanged his father Sibghatullah Shah in 1943 in a Hyderabad Central Jail.

It will be no exaggeration to describe him as one of the first of the many benefactors of the game of cricket which was in its year of infancy in the region, helping the cricketers of the 1950s financially and patronizing the future international cricketers of Pakistan, even funding them on their trips to England as members of the Pakistan Eaglets to be trained at the famous Alf Gover coaching school of London.

One of them was Rafiq Kazi, a fast bowler and my colleague in the Sindh team.His name, in the history of the game in Pakistan, will remain etched foreverfor the fact that he played in the first Quaid-e-Azam Trophy match in its inaugural year in 1953-54 as the captain of Sindh against Bahawalpur at the Dring Stadium, Bahawalpur.

Although Sindh lost the match, as a right-handed opening batsman, the Pir scored 1 and 15 in the match hitting three fours in the second innings. This was his only first-class match.

In 1956 when Donald Carr's MCC 'A' team visited Pakistan and a three-day match was abandoned against Sindh at the Rani Bagh in Hyderabad, the match was converted into a limited-overs game in which he led Sindh against the MCC.

Before the start of the match, the Pir even presented every MCC teammember with a new wrist watch. He ran his own Pir Pagara XI, inviting Test players like Hanif Mohammad to play for him and also ran his own practice nets in the premises of his house where cricketers Wallis Mathais, Ikram Elahi, Anwar Elahi and Mohammad Munaf would turn up to bowl at him.

Always immaculately attired in cream colour flannels, he would walk in to open the batting wearing a Solar hat. I was lucky to have the privilege of playing in a match against him for the Government College Hyderabad.

Hundreds of his 'Hur' followers had already started to gather outside the college for days to have a closer look at their spiritual leader.

In the match, he was struck by a bouncer and as he fell on the pitch his devoted followers charged on the field to take revenge from the bowler. The Pir, conscious albeit a bit shocked, prevented his supporters from assaulting the bowler.

His contribution to the game as its benefactor, I thought, merited a mention in the first Biographical Dictionary of Cricket published in the nineties by the Oxford University Press in London in which I wrote about his contributions along with other stalwarts of Pakistan cricket.

If not for early patronage of the game by generous men like Pir Pagara, cricket would have struggled for survival in the region.