664, 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. That detail is the whole reason this belongs on a list of things nobody has explained.

There is no scorecard for this one

School cricket in Bombay was not catalogued the way first-class cricket was. The partnership is one of the most cited numbers in Indian cricket and it exists largely in newspaper reports and recollection. You cannot pull it up alongside a Test match and read the bowling figures.

That is worth sitting with. The single most famous passage of junior cricket in the country's history has a weaker documentary record than a routine Ranji fixture from 1948.

What happened next

One went on to a hundred international hundreds and the longest career the game has seen. The other played seventeen Tests and was finished before he was thirty.

Everyone has a theory — temperament, discipline, luck, the way Indian cricket handled a young player from a poorer background who arrived with the wrong kind of confidence. Each theory explains part of it. None of them explains a gap that wide between two boys who were, for one afternoon, indistinguishable.

Why it isn't a morality tale

The tidy version says Tendulkar was disciplined and Kambli wasn't, and that the difference was character. It is a satisfying story and it is almost certainly too simple. Kambli averaged over fifty in Test cricket. He scored two double hundreds before he was twenty-two. Whatever ended that career, it was not a lack of ability, and the people who were in a position to know have never given a straight account of it.

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No. 7 in Mysteries, a series of 11.