The parts of the fixing story that never came out

The CBI investigation into match-fixing ended careers. A life ban for Mohammad Azharuddin. Another for Ajay Sharma. Five years for Ajay Jadeja. For a moment in 2000 it looked as though Indian cricket was going to find out what had been happening to it.

Then it stopped.

A first chapter

Anyone who has read the report knows it reads like an opening. Bookies are named. Players are named. And a great deal of everything else is left hanging: how far up it went, how many matches were involved, and how long the whole thing had been running before anybody noticed.

An investigation that produces bans is not the same as an investigation that produces an account. India got the first and never got the second.

The structural problem

The CBI could investigate criminal conduct. It could not compel the cricket board to act on anything outside that, and the board's own follow-up was neither independent nor published in full. So the report became the ceiling rather than the floor — the most that was ever established, rather than the least.

There is no scorecard to link to here, because that is the difficulty. Nobody has ever published a list of which matches were affected. The games are all still in the record books, unmarked, and every one of them is now permanently ambiguous.

What it cost

The lasting damage isn't the bans. It's that a generation of results from the 1990s cannot be read with confidence, and there is no mechanism left that could ever restore it. Twenty-six years on, the question “which matches?” has no answer and no prospect of one.

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No. 2 in Mysteries, a series of 11.