While Indian cricket fans lap up the excitement the Indian Premier League brings to them night after night, things were not quite so fulfilling and enriching 25 years ago. The 2000 match fixing controversy took a toll on every stakeholder of the game, including the greatest of names. One of those all-time greats—Kapil Dev—then the Indian team’s coach, cried on television in a BBC interview with Karan Thapar. If June 25, 1983 provided Kapil Dev his greatest cricketing moment, May 10, 2000 could well be ranked as one of his darkest days. That’s when the world saw him in their living rooms, unsuccessfully supressing his feelings at being accused of offering teammate Manoj Prabhakar a bribe to underperform. While Prabhakar did not reveal a name in his original piece on the offer, former BCCI president Indrajit Singh Bindra told CNN in an interview that Prabhakar had told him that the offer came from Kapil Dev.

The tears that the celebrated cricketer shed are etched in the memory of people who watched and didn’t watch that particular episode of Thapar’s HardTalk. In his book, Devil’s Advocate published by Harper Collins, Thapar recalled: “For the first ten minutes he [Kapil Dev] took my questions squarely on the chin. He seemed unruffled and undisturbed. But when I asked if he was worried about the fact that history might remember him not just as the captain of India’s World Cup-winning cricket team or the highest wicket-taker, but also as someone accused of accepting money to throw a match, a dam inside seemed to burst and his emotions poured out in a flood of tears. It happened so suddenly, it took me aback. Tears rolled down his cheeks, his voice began to quiver and then actually broke. His nose started to run. In fact, he was crying like a baby. Watching Kapil, I knew I had a moment of television magic on my hands.”