Mysteries
Things about cricket nobody has ever quite explained.
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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.
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2000
The parts of the fixing story that never came out
The CBI report ended careers and read like a first chapter. The rest of the chapters were never written.
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1996
Eden Gardens, 13 March 1996
A World Cup semi-final abandoned in flames, an allegation made fifteen years later, and no inquiry then or since.
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1975
Gavaskar’s 36
Sixty overs, 174 balls, one boundary, and an explanation that has never satisfied anybody — including the man who played the innings.
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1983
The innings nobody filmed
Kapil Dev made 175 not out from 17 for 5 and won India a World Cup. There is no moving footage of any of it.
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1948
The 443 nobody let him finish
Bhausaheb Nimbalkar was nine runs from Bradman’s world record when the opposition captain took his team to the railway station.
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1988
664, and the boy who didn’t make it
For one afternoon in 1988 they were indistinguishable. One made a hundred international hundreds. The other was finished before thirty.
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2004
The Nagpur pitch
A green track in Nagpur, two missing players, and two irreconcilable accounts of how it happened.
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2013–2014
The sealed envelope
Thirteen names went to the Supreme Court in a sealed envelope. Four came out. The rest are still numbers.
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2005
Who leaked the Chappell email
A private email from a coach to a board president ended a captaincy and reshaped a decade. Nobody has ever admitted to leaking it.
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1936
Why Lala Amarnath was really sent home
The best all-round cricketer on India’s 1936 tour of England was on a boat home before the first Test. The official reason has never held up.