Send for Nasser

Today Nasser Hussain and Mike Atherton, in India on Sky TV duty, slipped almost unnoticed through a busy airport and out into Mumbai, a money-making city of muggy sunshine and honking horns. Which made you wonder: is it just a lazy cliché to say that cricket’s ‘like a religion on the subcontinent’. Then, just as I had that thought, my bubbly taxi driver excitedly pointed out Hussain, started a detailed and unprompted analysis of his captaincy, asked me about Alastair Cook, and reeled off the exact scores that Dravid and Laxman made in the Eden Gardens Aussie-bashing of 2000-01. Later, I checked the scorecard. He was dead right.

Any more injuries for England and Nasser might get a call © Getty Images

Even to someone who occasionally bumps into the pair, there’s still something otherworldly about seeing Atherton standing at the baggage carousel, just like Joe Bloggs, or Hussain waiting in line to change his travellers’ cheques. You forget they were just human beings, doing a job like everyone else. As a journalist it’s a chastening thought; we don’t have some laptop-pounding know-all damning us for having a bad day at the office - and I don’t think we’d like it if we did.

Given that in the 1990s England fetched David Gower out of a West Indies press box to play, the former captains Athers and Nasser must be a little worried. A fortnight ago it was India who had a captaincy problem: amateur psychologists suggested England could create confusion by stirring up the Ganguly situation like a wasp’s nest. Two weeks on, it’s England who have the problem. This tour was always going to be tricky for a captain: how to motivate an Ashes-winning squad who, as Andrew Miller recently pointed out, will never have to buy a meal or a drink in England again; how to switch focus from MBEs to India’s MO; whether to go for the throat or wait for their opponents to trip up. England have not won a Test in India since 1984-85; for Andrew Flintoff, in his first Test as captain, it's what they call a 'big ask'.

Still there is a sliver of hope. Funny things happen in India. En route to the hotel, we stopped at a set of lights and a kerbside salesman tried to sell me a book, a work by the Cambridge University economist Amartya Sen. In London, hawkers looking for a bit of cash squeegee your windscreen; in Mumbai they sell you books on philosophy. Yes, funny things happen in India. But England Test wins are not usually one of them.