664, and the boy who didn’t make it

Shardashram Vidyamandir were playing St Xavier's in the Harris Shield, a Bombay schools competition, in February 1988. Two boys came together early and were not separated.

Sachin Tendulkar was fourteen. Vinod Kambli was sixteen. They put on 664.

The partnership

Kambli made 349 not out. Tendulkar made 326 not out. Their coach eventually declared at 748 for two, reportedly against the wishes of both boys.

Of the two, Kambli was the one people talked about. He was older, he was more spectacular, he hit the ball harder, and he took wickets as well. For a period in the late eighties, anyone assessing Bombay schools cricket would have named him first.

There is no scorecard for this

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 survives largely in newspaper reports and recollection.

You cannot open it alongside a Ranji match and read the bowling figures. You cannot find out who bowled at them, or for how long, or what the ground was, with the certainty available for a routine domestic fixture from 1948.

The single most famous passage of junior cricket in the country's history has a weaker documentary record than an ordinary first-class match played forty years earlier.

In 2013 it turned out to be worse than weak. The scorebook was gone. The Mumbai School Sports Association had incinerated it, and the explanation its secretary gave was entirely reasonable: they could not store everything, and nobody expects a schools body to keep files for twenty-five years. Which is the point. The decision that destroyed the only primary record of the most famous partnership in Indian schoolboy cricket was a filing decision, taken by people with no reason to think it mattered.

Martin Williamson, Rewind: when two Hyderabad schoolboys passed the record, ESPNcricinfo, 8 March 2013 →

Even the individual scores are reported inconsistently depending on where you look, which for a partnership this famous is remarkable on its own. There was no official scorer producing a card that anybody archived.

What happened to each of them

Tendulkar played 200 Tests over twenty-four years and made a hundred international hundreds.

Kambli played seventeen Tests. He averaged over fifty in them and made two double centuries before he was twenty-two, which is a start almost nobody in the history of the game has matched. He was out of the Test side by twenty-three and out of international cricket before thirty.

The tidy version

The story as it is usually told says that Tendulkar was disciplined and Kambli was not, and that the difference between them was character. It is satisfying, it is repeated constantly, and it is almost certainly too simple.

Whatever ended that career, it was not a lack of ability; the numbers rule that out. Kambli came from a poorer background than Tendulkar and into a system with no interest in supporting anyone through a bad year. He was dropped, recalled, dropped again, and given no run of matches in which to fail and recover.

Everyone has a theory. Temperament, discipline, luck, the way Indian cricket handled a young man who arrived with the wrong kind of confidence. Each theory explains part of it.

Why the tidy version survives

The character explanation has one large advantage over every rival: it requires nothing of anybody. If Kambli failed because of who he was, then the selectors were right, the coaches were adequate, the board was neutral and the system worked exactly as designed.

Any other explanation implicates somebody who is still alive and still respected. That is not proof the tidy version is wrong. It is a reason to notice how comfortable it is.

The gap

None of them explains a gap that wide between two boys who were, for one afternoon in February 1988, indistinguishable.

The people in a position to know have never given a straight account of it, and are not going to. The selectors who dropped him. The coaches who handled him. The administrators who did not intervene.

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No. 7 in Mysteries, a series of 11.

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