Pitched suddenly into England’s cricket captaincy, it has been a delight to see Andrew Flintoff going about the job with a smile on his face. However the series ultimately pans out, wholehearted Flintoff’s ursine charms made for a winning start all right. Traditionally, of course, established England captains steered clear of India. The anointed monarchs of my boyhood (Hammond, Yardley, Brown, Hutton and May) never once led a tour to the sub-continent, hiving off the captaincy to such greenhorn amateur apprentices as Nigel Howard and Donald Carr. Later, stalwart county captains like Tony Lewis and Keith Fletcher were given one-tour commands.
I was on the latter’s trip in 1981–82. Unlike the present one — arrive late Feb, home mid-April — we were away from the end of October to the beginning of March. India won the first Test and the next five were drawn. It is still considered the most tedious series in history; nevertheless I was beguiled and enchanted. There was time to get out and explore; now, between playing and net practice, they never poke their noses out of the marbled ‘intercontinental’ hotels. Fletcher was not the most, well, ambassadorial captain of England. The Essex countryman never got to grips with the overwhelming place. When we played at Baroda he was cautioned by the FCO for addressing the Maharajah as ‘old cock’. Fletch had played in Colombo years before, when it was capital of Ceylon, and when we rounded off the tour with a seventh Test, Sri Lanka’s first ever, in front of every local dignitary you could think of, the captain in his public speeches could never stop himself calling it Sri-Lon, as in: ‘’Ow ’appy we are to be in Srilon.’ In fact Swi-Lon, for lisping Fletch always had trouble with his r’s (in spite of the fact that he named his two daughters Tara and Sara).
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