Fergie's flipper, and railway-carriage nights

Cometh the hour, cometh a pronouncement from Shoaib Akhtar. A year after being savaged by Sachin Tendulkar in a World Cup encounter at Centurion, Akhtar preached the team mantra while looking ahead to the forthcoming series. "The media may bill it as a `Shoaib vs Tendulkar' contest but this series is much more than that," he said in an interview to Reuters. "We have to go at all the Indian batsmen if we want to win the series. If we play as a team we will win. Cricket is definitely a team game although individuals might dominate it."

He was philosophical about the Centurion hiding. "I think I am a more improved, controlled and focused bowler after that game," he said. "Both teams have to prove themselves once again ... I think it would be a case of how our bowling fares against their strong batting. Because while their bowling is inexperienced our batting is a bit inexperienced."

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Hanif Mohammad, the subcontinent's original Little Master, took a walk down memory lane in the pages of The Times of India. Speaking about the 1954-55 series, characterised by stifling defensive cricket, he gave insight into a time when winning wasn't quite everything. "The matches were keenly fought but there was nothing called sledging," he said. "In fact, during those times bowlers would give way to the batsmen as they ran between the wickets. And if they'd be caught in the middle, they'd apologise. The camaraderie was brilliant."

Hanif, who also remembers being flummoxed by Subhash Gupte's flipper, suggests that relations between the sides off the pitch were also cordial. "My mother, who was from India , was a cricket buff," he said. "She insisted that we host a banquet for the Indian team. We used to live at our Garden Road residence at that time. Getting someone who could cook Indian food was a big problem. But after much struggle, we found a cook in Karachi. He prepared delicious Indian food, and mind you separately for the vegetarians in the team."

"The party was great fun with dance, music and jokes," he added. "I still have a picture with my mother, brother Wazir, bhabhi posing with Indian cricketers like Naren Tamhane, [Vijay] Manjrekar and Gupte. That's a treasure for life."

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Polly Umrigar's view of that same tour is a little different. "Then, as now, there was a fear psychosis about touring an unfriendly country," he told The Times of India. "Some players were scared to go, but I wasn't. There was security. When we went to a cinema there would be cops all around us. But we came back having enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. The culinary fare laid out was straight out of Arabian Nights, biryani with badam, pista and all. There was a marked difference in the hospitality as we moved northwards [in Pakistan]. The south was not so friendly."

"When we reached Lahore, there were people taking us to some homes and pointing out `these are yours' -- homes from where the Hindus had fled during Partition. Rickshaw-wallahs would not take money from Indian fans. `Hamare bhai aaye hain' [our brothers have come], they would say."

Umrigar had mixed memories of events on and off the field. "The warmth was mixed at the ground as well," he said. "There was no hooting by the crowds, no jeering. There was no cheering when we hit a four. But we didn't mind. At Lyallpur, the team had to stay in a railway bogey as the city had no hotels. It was quite upsetting to some players. But there were good hotels in the other cities."

Nostalgia isn't always about rose-tinted glasses though. Never one to mouth empty platitudes, Umrigar went on to say that the cricket played on the tour "tended to be boring".