Gavaskar’s 36

England made 334 for four in the first match of the first World Cup, at Lord’s on 7 June 1975. Dennis Amiss made 137 from 147 balls with eighteen fours. Keith Fletcher made 68. Chris Old came in at the end and made 51 from 30.

It was the largest total ever made in a one-day international. The format was nineteen matches old and India had played two of them. Three of the eleven who took the field were making their debuts in it. The captain was Srinivas Venkataraghavan.

India had sixty overs to get 335. Sunil Gavaskar opened the batting.

Sixty overs

Eknath Solkar was caught by Peter Lever off Geoff Arnold with 21 on the board. Anshuman Gaekwad made 22 and went at 50. Gundappa Viswanath made 37 and was out at 108, in the thirty-fifth over, with India needing 227 from 25.

That was the last wicket to fall. Brijesh Patel came in and made 16 not out from 57 balls.

At the other end Gavaskar batted through. He faced 174 deliveries and hit one boundary. He was 36 not out when the sixty overs were done and India had reached 132 for three.

They lost by 202 runs having lost only three wickets, which is a thing that does not otherwise happen.

Full scorecard: England v India, Lord's, 7 June 1975 →

The other end

Gundappa Viswanath faced 59 balls for his 37 and hit five fours. He was scoring at three times Gavaskar’s rate, off the same bowlers, on the same afternoon, in the same match.

So the pitch was not the explanation and neither was the attack. Whatever was happening that afternoon was happening at one end only, to one man, for reasons that were not visible from the boundary and have not become visible in the fifty years since.

What the bowling figures show

John Snow bowled twelve overs for 24 runs and took nothing. Geoff Arnold went for 20 from ten. Barry Wood bowled five overs for four runs.

England were not bowling to contain; there was nothing to contain. They set fields for a batsman playing out time in a match that had stopped being a contest before lunch, and the scoring rate for the innings was 2.20 an over.

What was said

India's team manager called the innings selfish in public afterwards, which tells you the temperature in the dressing room. The crowd, including a large number of Indian supporters who had come to Lord's for the occasion, barracked him for much of the afternoon.

Theories circulated for decades: a protest at Srinivas Venkataraghavan being given the captaincy over him, bad blood in the side, a target written off within the first hour, an experiment in facing a full sixty overs.

Gavaskar’s version

Offered years later, and unusually honest: he said he could not explain it. He described being stuck in a mental rut and unable either to force the pace or to get himself out. A kind of paralysis rather than a protest, which he said he understood no better than anybody else.

That answer has the ring of truth and it cannot be checked against anything. It is not a claim about the world; it is a claim about the inside of a man's head fifty years ago.

He was not dropped. He kept the opening job, and he captained India within two years. Nothing that happened afterwards looks like the treatment of a player in disgrace, which makes the theories about protest harder to sustain and the episode harder to file anywhere.

The manager’s remark was made once, in public, in the heat of a bad afternoon. No board inquiry followed. No selector ever explained what they made of it. The most notorious innings in Indian one-day cricket produced no institutional record at all.

The best-documented innings nobody understands

Every delivery is accounted for. 174 balls, 36 runs, one four, a strike rate of 20.68, in a match with a full scorecard and a result and a crowd of witnesses.

The numbers are perfect and they explain nothing. It remains the only innings in cricket where the record is complete and the meaning is entirely absent.

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No. 4 in Mysteries, a series of 11.

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