The 443 nobody let him finish

Kathiawar were bowled out for 238 on the first day at the Poona Club Ground in December 1948. Maharashtra lost their opening batsman at 81 and then did not lose another for a very long time.

Bhausaheb Nimbalkar came in at three. He was 24 not out at the close.

Three days

On the second day Nimbalkar and Kamal Bhandarkar batted through the morning, through the afternoon, and into the evening. Their partnership was worth 455 runs by the time Bhandarkar was caught for 205.

Maharashtra closed the second day on 587 for two. Nimbalkar was 301 not out.

He carried on through the third morning with Sharad Deodhar, who made 93. The scoreboard passed 700 and then 800. By the middle of the afternoon Nimbalkar was on 443 and Maharashtra were 826 for four.

Don Bradman's world record for the highest first-class innings stood at 452 not out. Nimbalkar needed ten runs to pass it. There was a session left that day and the whole of a fourth day after it.

Full scorecard: Maharashtra v Kathiawar, Poona, 16–18 December 1948 →

The railway station

At tea the Kathiawar captain, the Thakore Saheb of Rajkot, told his opposite number that his side would not be coming back out. Maharashtra asked for two more overs. He refused.

The Kathiawar players packed their bags and left for the railway station. The match was over.

The scorecard records the result, with no apparent sense of occasion, as Maharashtra won by default. It is the only first-class match in the history of the game to have been abandoned because a world record was about to be broken by the wrong person.

What the innings actually contained

Maharashtra faced 180 overs and scored at 4.58 an over, in 1948, in a Ranji Trophy first round. Nimbalkar was at the crease for the whole of it after the eighty-first run.

Four hundred and forty-three not out, from 494 minutes, with 49 fours and a six. Ten Kathiawar bowlers were used, including the captain, and none of them dismissed him.

Ten Kathiawar bowlers were used. The captain bowled two overs. So did Harpal Deo, who went for twenty of them. Nobody dismissed him.

By the end the bowling figures had stopped meaning anything. Four men conceded more than a hundred runs each.

It remains the highest score ever made by an Indian in first-class cricket and the highest in the history of the Ranji Trophy, seventy-seven years later.

Nimbalkar had also bowled in the match, six overs for 26.

The shape of the three days

At the close of the first day Maharashtra were 132 for one and Nimbalkar had 24. At the close of the second they were 587 for two and he had 301. He had made 277 runs in a day, which is more than most first-class batsmen manage in a season of good weeks.

Bradman’s 452 not out had stood since 1930. It was broken in 1959 by Hanif Mohammad, who made 499 and was run out going for the five hundredth.

Between those two men sits an afternoon in Poona. The record was not broken there because the other side went home.

Why nobody knows

Boredom is what the record books say. Wounded pride is the popular version. Neither is documented, because nobody involved ever set out an account that could be checked.

The Thakore Saheb had taken the field as a player as well as a captain and had top-scored for Kathiawar with 77 in the first innings, which complicates the caricature of a nobleman sulking. He did not explain himself then and was never obliged to afterwards.

The second mystery

Nimbalkar was twenty-nine and had just made the highest score by an Indian in the history of the first-class game, which in most cricketing cultures of most eras would have been treated as a fairly strong argument for a place in the side, and which in this case appears to have been treated as nothing at all.

Nimbalkar never played a Test match.

The man who holds the highest first-class score ever made by an Indian was not selected, and no selector of the period left behind a reason. That is either a story about regional politics in Indian cricket in the 1940s or it is a story about nothing at all, and the difference has never been established.

Two records survive from those three days: 443 not out, and a result decided at a railway station. The reasoning behind either one does not.

••••••

No. 6 in Mysteries, a series of 11.

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