Winning was relatively easy in the Good OldDays of the Raj. When Douglas Jardine captained England in India's first homeTest series in 1933-4, the winter after he had put the Australians in theirplace with Bodyline, the martinet made damn sure it was not only a party ofplayers that he took with him. By Jove, no, sir!
Jardine took along a former England player aswell to do the umpiring, Bill Hitch of Surrey, and found an old Australian whohad played many seasons for Middlesex to stand at the other end. In India’sinaugural home series, no native Indian was allowed to umpire. England won 2-0.
Even after independence, the playing field wasstill not level. Until Kerry Packer’s World Series in the late 1970s, England’scricketers were professionals while those of every other country – includingIndia – were amateurs, playing weekend club matches and the odd first-classgame.
This imbalance accounts for six more ofEngland’s dozen victories. India were overrun by professional spinners atKanpur in 1951-52, Lancashire’s Roy Tattersall and Malcolm Hilton. Although theseries ended 1-1, a jolly good tour was had as the England players were put upby British families ‘staying on’ and had a merrier social life than presentplayers stuck in hotels.
County cricket was opened up in 1968, allowingoverseas players to sign without any qualification period and becomeprofessionals, but Indians never fancied the daily grind as Pakistanis did.Bishan Bedi was happy to bowl all day for Northamptonshire, and SrinivasVenkatraghavan for Derbyshire, but that was about it: Kapil Dev tried a coupleof half-hearted seasons and Sunil Gavaskar one for Somerset.
So the playing field was still not level whenEngland won once in 1972-73, three times in 1976-77, and in the one-off Jubileematch of 1980.
England’s batsmen may have found turningpitches unfamiliar, especially when they were prepared with wire brushes, as inCalcutta on Tony Greig’s tour. But India’s batsmen had no experience of facingfast bowling – whether short-pitched or swing – except if they had previouslytoured overseas.
Thus Bob Willis, John Lever and Ian Bothamenjoyed field days in India. The helmet, like worldwide professionalism, didnot arrive until the late Seventies; there was no limitation of two bouncersper over. It was back to the Raj and the Good Old Days.
Only four of England’s victories in India havetherefore come when both sides have been equally matched and fullyprofessional.
And in two of them England owed something notjust to their own efforts but to rather strange goings-on within the Indianteam.
In 1984-85, as now, England’s spinners wereevery bit as good as India’s, in this case Phil Edmonds and Pat Pocock.
But the pressure they exerted in Delhi doesnot entirely account for Kapil Dev having a slog on the last afternoon. Therewere rumours of tension between Kapil, the ex-captain, and Gavaskar, who hadreplaced him. Kapil was dropped for the next match, and not on playing grounds.
In 2006 in Mumbai, India sent England in tobat: strange. England totalled 400 but even then Ajay Jadeja, the former Indianplayer who had been banned for match-fixing, kept saying on television thatonly two results were possible, a draw or a win for India: strange.
Then on the last afternoon several homeplayers decided the best way to play for a draw was to see how high into theair they could slog the off-breaks of Shaun Udal.
So England’s two most meritorious wins inIndia have been the most recent and the one at Madras in 1984-85, when NeilFoster took 11 wickets with his lively outswing, and both Graeme Fowler andMike Gatting made double centuries in sapping heat.
But this most recent has to be the best ofall. You could see what it meant to the England players as Monty Panesar andGraeme Swann took wicket after wicket in India’s second innings: VirenderSehwag for nine, Sachin Tendulkar for eight, Virat Kohli for seven, all gropingas blindly as England’s batsmen – bar Alastair Cook and Matt Prior – had inAhmedabad.
Never have you seen such animation from thisgeneration of England cricketers as they appealed for catches and lbws thencelebrated wildly: Panesar was by no means the most excited when he chargeddown the pitch waving his arms.
They knew what they were doing: beating Indiaat their own spinning game, in their home of cricket, and achieving a resultthat will be remembered through the ages.