The innings nobody filmed

Kapil Dev, 175 not out off 138 balls against Zimbabwe at Tunbridge Wells, coming in with India 17 for 5 and the 1983 World Cup on the line. Sixteen fours, six sixes. The knock that made everything afterwards possible.

And there is no film of it.

What the scorecard shows

The fall of wickets is the whole drama in one line: 1 for 0, 6 for 2, 6 for 3, 9 for 4, 17 for 5. Gavaskar, Srikkanth, Amarnath, Patil and Yashpal Sharma were all back in the pavilion with 17 on the board, four of them caught behind or in the cordon.

Kapil came in and made 175 not out. He and Syed Kirmani, who finished 24 not out, put on 126 for the ninth wicket after the eighth fell at 140. India reached 266 for 8. Zimbabwe were bowled out for 235, Kapil taking 1 for 32 and holding two catches, and India won by 31 runs.

Full scorecard: India v Zimbabwe, Nevill Ground, Tunbridge Wells, 18 June 1983 →

The strike

BBC technicians were on strike. The match wasn't televised. There is no moving footage — a handful of photographs, a scorecard, and the memories of a few thousand people at the Nevill Ground in Kent.

Every other landmark innings of the era exists as video. This one exists as testimony. The most important Indian innings of its generation survives only as an oral tradition, which is either a tragedy or the most fitting thing that could have happened to it.

The part that is genuinely unknown

What nobody can now establish is what the innings actually looked like. Was it controlled or was it a slog? Did Zimbabwe bowl badly at the end? The accounts we have were written by people with a stake in the legend, decades later, and there is nothing to check them against.

The scoreboard survived perfectly. Everything else about that afternoon is hearsay, and always will be.

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No. 5 in Mysteries, a series of 11.