Kapil Dev's knock of 175 not out against Zimbabwe in the 1983 cricket World Cup in England is often regarded as the greatest innings ever played. India was in a do-or-die match. Both the openers — Sunil Gavaskar and Krishnamachari Srikanth — had been dismissed for a duck. The scoreboard read 9/4. Enter Dev. He took a little while to settle in, even as wickets kept tumbling till a woeful 78/7. That's when the captain decided to take matters into his own hands. Like a man possessed, he went after the hapless Zimbabwe bowlers, hitting the ball out of the park, quite literally. India eventually reached a respectful 266. Zimbabwe was bundled out for 235. What happened later in the World Cup is, of course, the stuff of history. But there is no recorded evidence of Dev's seminal innings since both the TV and radio departments of BBC were on strike that day. Only the 7,000-odd spectators at Tunbridge Wells have a complete idea of the mayhem he unleashed.

One of those spectators was former mid-day editor, Ayaz Memon, and you can now hear his account of the innings on 22 Yarns, a podcast that Gaurav Kapur launched recently. The whole idea behind the show is to highlight these untold bits of cricketing folklore. Kapur brings on one guest in each episode, who is an expert on a certain aspect of cricket, such as Memon for journalism and Harsha Bhogle for broadcasting. The two then have a freewheeling chat in which Kapur digs his guest for stories. He tells us, "When we were working on the captaincy episode with Joy Bhattacharya, for example, we asked ourselves, 'Have we got everything?' That's when we realised that it's impossible to get 'everything' when you have just around 40 minutes. So we thought, let's just make sure that the stories we tell are compelling; that you go, 'What the hell! I didn't know that,' at least two or three times in every episode."