Look out, look out, the English are coming!

At least four thousand England cricket fans are in Mumbai, and the city is almost unrecognizable from last week’s slightly daunting prospect. In spite of the lack of alcohol, the atmosphere inside the ground is jovial and the second-loudest English cheer of the day – after the acclamation for Strauss’s superb century – comes in mid-afternoon, when a lone trumpeter issues a glorious fanfare. The familiar songs follow (Jerusalem, the Great Escape theme, ‘super, super Fred’) and soon all is well with the world.

Poor little rich boy
Whenever Sachin Tendulkar so much as wanders within twenty yards of the boundary, there’s pandemonium in the crowds. He may have been superceded by Rahul Dravid as India’s premier batsman, but the ‘Little Master’ remains the nation’s only cricketing deity. He’s been coping with this sort of lunacy since the age of 16, and I simply don’t know how he does it.

One for the future
The England debutant Owais Shah played beautifully for his unbeaten fifty today, taking to Test cricket like a duck to a 1990s English scorecard. Our players are usually described as ‘compact’, ‘powerful’, ‘elegant’ or ‘clinical’. But Shah seems to be something rather different: on first sight, he appears to fit that most alien of adjectives, ‘flamboyant’. He should be back for more on day two, and it’s a mouthwatering prospect.