Bring it on

In a little under twenty-four hours, weather permitting, the captains will toss and the eagerly anticipated England v India series will be underway. But what will happen?

England will look to start well and may well see Lord’s as their most likely victory of the summer. Lord’s has never been a happy hunting ground for India, a solitary test victory in 1986 and the 1983 World Cup final aside, and the evidence of their warm-up game is that they are a little undercooked. They played some decent, if unambitious, cricket in the Caribbean, but they will find conditions, not to mention the opposition, rather different in England and they would have benefited from more than one game to acclimatise, especially given how poorly they performed in it.

It is, of course, unwise to draw too man conclusions from tour matches - in 1993 Shane Warne was pasted all around New Road prior to bamboozling England in the tests – but there was little in India’s cricket at Taunton to keep the Andys awake at night. At Lord’s they will be bolstered by the return of Tendulkar, but his horrible record at Lord’s coupled with his lack of recent first class cricket may make the dream of completing his hundredth international hundred at the home of cricket unattainable, wonderful though it would be. If England perform as they can, and the weather behaves, then England could well leave North London with a 1-0 lead, and after that anything is possible.

There is no doubt that this is a fine Indian side – you don’t get to be number one in the world by accident, after all. However, the feeling lurks that they are a side just starting a downward slide. Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman have been written off before, of course, but they are all close to the end of their remarkable careers and a decline will have to set in at some point. England, in the meantime, are on the way up. The question is whether or not their upward trajectory will overtake Indian’s gentle downward curve this summer. Reading Gideon Haigh’s marvellous book about the recent Ashes series I was reminded of the 1958-9 England side that was touted as the strongest ever to leave these shores yet was hammered 4-0 in Australia. Speaking afterwards, Peter May blamed the defeat on the team looking better on paper than on the pitch – too many big names were finishing their careers. The thought persists that this may also be true of India in 2010-11.

All that said, however, it is hard not to see India’s quality shining through at some point. 2-1 to England.