Who leaked the Chappell email

Greg Chappell sent a private email to the BCCI president from Zimbabwe, saying his captain was not fit — mentally or physically — to lead the side. Within days it was in every newspaper in India, attributed to unknown sources.

Twenty-one years later, nobody has said who put it there.

The accounts that exist

Virender Sehwag has said he was sitting beside Chappell as the email was typed, read it over his shoulder, and went and warned Sourav Ganguly. Harbhajan Singh has said he saw it on an open laptop.

Both of those are accounts of how players came to know. Neither is an account of how a journalist came to have the text. Those are different questions, and only the first has ever been answered.

What it did

The leak ended a captaincy. It triggered street protests in Kolkata, effigy-burnings, and a split in Indian cricket's support base that lasted years. It set the terms for the Chappell era and, through it, for the reconstruction that followed.

There is no scorecard for this one. It is one of the few entries on this list where the decisive event happened entirely off the field — an email, a newsroom, and a chain of custody nobody has ever described.

Why nobody talks

Leak stories usually resolve eventually. Someone retires, writes a book, settles a score. This one hasn't, and the reason is probably that the leak served several people at once, which means several people have a reason to keep quiet.

The email is public. Its route into public is not. That gap has now outlasted the careers of everyone who was in the room.

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No. 10 in Mysteries, a series of 11.