Ten things about Indian cricket nobody has ever quite explained

Cricket is measured to death. Ball-tracking, wagon wheels, expected runs, heat maps of where a bowler landed 84 per cent of his deliveries. Every ball bowled in a Test match since 1877 is catalogued and free to search.

And the sport’s Indian chapter is full of holes. Not holes in the scoring, which is immaculate, but in everything the scoring cannot hold. Why a decision was taken. Who agreed to it. What was said in a dressing room, and by whom.

Here are ten of them, in order of age. Each is written up in full on its own page, with the scorecard where one exists and a plain statement where one does not.

1936India’s best all-round cricketer was sent home from a tour of England for “indiscipline”, then quietly cleared. No minute of that decision has ever been produced. Read it →

1948Nine runs from Bradman’s world record, the opposition captain took his team to the railway station. The card records it as won by default. Read it →

1975Sixty overs, 174 balls, one boundary. The only innings in cricket where the record is complete and the meaning is entirely absent. Read it →

1983175 not out from 17 for 5, and the BBC technicians were on strike. No moving footage of it exists. Read it →

1988For one afternoon they were indistinguishable. One made a hundred international hundreds; the other was finished before thirty. Read it →

1996A World Cup semi-final abandoned in flames, an allegation made on television fifteen years later, and no inquiry then or since. Read it →

2000The report ended careers and read like a first chapter. Nobody has ever published a list of which matches were affected. Read it →

2004A green pitch, two missing players, and two irreconcilable accounts told by interested parties. No paper trail survives. Read it →

2005A private email ended a captaincy and reshaped a decade. Nobody has ever admitted putting it in front of a journalist. Read it →

2013–2014Thirteen names went to the Supreme Court in a sealed envelope. Four came out. The rest are still numbers. Read it →

What links these is not conspiracy. It is the absence of a record. Indian cricket grew faster than its institutions, and for long stretches nobody was writing anything down. Or somebody was, and chose not to share it. The scoreboard survives. The reasons do not.

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No. 1 in Mysteries, a series of 11.

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