The 443 nobody let him finish

Bhausaheb Nimbalkar was 443 not out at Poona, nine runs from Don Bradman's world record for the highest first-class score. Maharashtra were 826 for 4. There was a session and a full day left in a four-day match.

He never got the nine runs. He never got another chance at them either.

What the scorecard shows

Kathiawar batted first and made 238, their captain — the Thakore Sahib of Rajkot — top-scoring with 77. Maharashtra replied with 826 for 4. Kamal Bhandarkar made 205. Sharad Deodhar made 93. And Nimbalkar, batting at three, was unbeaten on 443 from 494 minutes, with 49 fours and a six.

The close-of-play lines tell the story better than any account of it. At the end of the second day he was 301 not out. On the third, he went past 400 and kept going.

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

The railway station

At tea, the Thakore Sahib told his opposite number to declare or his team was leaving. Maharashtra asked for two more overs. He refused. The Kathiawar players packed their bags and went to the railway station. The match was forfeited.

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

Two mysteries, stacked

Boredom, the record books say. Wounded pride is the popular theory. Nobody knows, because nobody involved ever set out a version that can be checked.

And there is a second mystery stacked on the first: Nimbalkar never played a Test. The highest score ever made by an Indian in first-class cricket, still the highest in Ranji Trophy history after seventy-seven years, belongs to a man the national selectors never picked. That is either a story about regional politics or a story about nothing at all, and the difference has never been established.

••••••

No. 6 in Mysteries, a series of 11.