1936 – 2014
Ten things about Indian cricket nobody has ever quite explained
Envelopes nobody opened, footage nobody shot, decisions nobody has ever properly accounted for.
Indian cricket is measured to death these days. Ball-tracking, wagon wheels, expected runs, heat maps of where a bowler landed 84% of his deliveries. And yet the sport's Indian chapter is riddled with holes.
Here are ten of them, roughly in order of age. Each has since been written up on its own, at length, with the scorecard where one exists. Some are scandals. Some are just strange. None of them has a tidy ending.
01Why Lala Amarnath was really sent home (1936)
He was the best all-round cricketer on the tour of England — six hundred-odd runs, thirty-plus wickets in the warm-up games — and he was on a boat back to Bombay before the first Test, on grounds of "indiscipline."
The official version is thin. The trigger, by most accounts, was Amarnath losing his temper in the dressing room after captain Vizzy made him sit padded up for hours and then sent him in near stumps. Vizzy worked with the team manager to have him removed. Amarnath was later cleared. What has never been fully established is who agreed to what, and why the Indian board wasn't consulted before a man's tour was ended.
02The 443 nobody let him finish (1948)
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.
At tea, Kathiawar's captain — the Thakore Sahib of Rajkot — 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.
Boredom, the record books say. Wounded pride is the popular theory. Nobody knows. Nimbalkar never played a Test either, which is a second mystery stacked on the first.
03Gavaskar's 36 (1975)
The opening game of the first World Cup, at Lord's. England made 334. Sunil Gavaskar opened, batted all sixty overs, and finished on 36 not out from 174 balls with a single boundary. India crawled to 132 for 3.
The team manager called it selfish in public, which tells you how bad the mood was. Theories circulated for decades: a protest at Venkataraghavan being handed the captaincy, bad blood in the dressing room, a target he'd written off. Gavaskar's own explanation, years later, was that he couldn't explain it — he described getting stuck in a mental rut and being unable to either force the pace or get out. It remains the most famous unexplained innings in the game.
04The innings nobody filmed (1983)
Kapil Dev, 175 not out off 138 balls against Zimbabwe at Tunbridge Wells, coming in at 17 for 5 with India's World Cup on the line. Sixteen fours, six sixes. The knock that made 1983 possible.
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 in Kent. The most important Indian innings of its generation exists only as an oral tradition, which is either a tragedy or the most fitting thing that could have happened to it.
05664, and the boy who didn't make it
February 1988, Harris Shield, Mumbai schools cricket. Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli put on 664 unbroken. Kambli made 349 not out; Tendulkar 326 not out. Kambli was the more eye-catching of the two at the time.
One went on to a hundred international hundreds. The other played seventeen Tests and was finished before thirty. Everyone has a theory — temperament, discipline, luck, the way Indian cricket handled him. None of them fully explains a gap that wide between two boys who were, for one afternoon, indistinguishable.
06Eden Gardens, 13 March 1996
Chasing 252 in a World Cup semi-final, India slid from 98 for one to 120 for eight. The crowd started fires and threw bottles. Match referee Clive Lloyd abandoned the game and awarded it to Sri Lanka. Kambli walked off in tears, and that image outlived the match.
Fifteen years later Kambli said on television that he doubted the game — specifically, that India had agreed to bat first and Azharuddin then chose to field. Azharuddin, by then serving a life ban for match-fixing, dismissed it flatly. Team manager Ajit Wadekar said they simply misread the pitch. There was no inquiry. There still hasn't been one.
07The parts of the fixing story that never came out (2000)
The CBI investigation ended careers — a life ban for Azharuddin, another for Ajay Sharma, five years for Ajay Jadeja. But anyone who has read the report knows it reads like a first chapter. Bookies named, players named, and a great deal of everything else left hanging: how far up it went, how many matches, and how long the whole thing had been running before anyone noticed.
08The Nagpur pitch (2004)
India were 1–0 down to Australia. The Nagpur track turned up green. Sourav Ganguly, the captain, missed the Test with an injury; so did Harbhajan Singh. India lost by 342 runs and Australia won a series in India for the first time in 35 years.
Curator Kishore Pradhan has said Ganguly asked him to shave the grass off and was refused, with the Vidarbha association backing the curator. Matthew Hayden later wrote that the two Indians simply didn't fancy it, which Harbhajan called a stunt to sell books. Two irreconcilable stories about one Test match, twenty years on.
09Who leaked the Chappell email (2005)
Greg Chappell sent a private email to the BCCI president from Zimbabwe, saying his captain wasn't fit — mentally or physically — to lead. Within days it was in every newspaper in India, attributed to unknown sources.
Virender Sehwag has said he was sitting beside Chappell as it was typed and went and warned Ganguly. Harbhajan has said he peered at an open laptop. Nobody has ever admitted to putting it in front of a journalist. That leak ended a captaincy, triggered street protests, and reshaped a decade of Indian cricket.
10The sealed envelope (2014)
The Mudgal Committee handed the Supreme Court a sealed envelope containing thirteen names connected to the 2013 IPL spot-fixing scandal. Four were eventually made public: N. Srinivasan, Gurunath Meiyappan, Raj Kundra and Sundar Raman. The rest — widely believed to include players — were referred to only by number.
The envelope was never opened. One name slipped out accidentally in court and belonged to a member of India's 2015 World Cup squad. Justice Mudgal himself has said the chapter is closed. It is the single largest known unknown in Indian cricket, and it is now more than a decade old.
••••••
What links these is not conspiracy. It's the absence of a record. Indian cricket grew faster than its institutions, and for long stretches nobody was writing anything down — or, worse, somebody was and chose not to share it. The scoreboard survives. The reasons don't.
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