The sealed envelope

The Mudgal Committee handed the Supreme Court of India 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 were referred to only by number.

The envelope was never opened.

What is actually known

The committee's remit was to investigate allegations around the 2013 IPL, including the involvement of team officials. Its findings led to the Lodha Committee reforms and to sweeping structural change at the BCCI — so the process was not a failure in any ordinary sense. It produced consequences.

What it did not produce was disclosure. Nine names, on the committee's own account connected seriously enough to be included, remain sealed.

The name that slipped

One name emerged accidentally during court proceedings and belonged to a member of India's 2015 World Cup squad. That is the closest anyone has come to the contents of the envelope, and it arrived by mistake rather than by decision.

Justice Mudgal has since said the chapter is closed.

The largest known unknown

There is no scorecard here either, and in this case the absence is the entire story. Cricket's records are unusually complete: every ball, every dismissal, every partnership since the nineteenth century. Set against that, a sealed list of thirteen people whose conduct was serious enough to investigate and not serious enough to name is a remarkable thing for the sport to be carrying.

It is the single largest known unknown in Indian cricket, and it is now more than a decade old. Nothing in the current structure is ever likely to open it.

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No. 9 in Mysteries, a series of 11.