The much trumpeted Indian batting line-up has no one to blame but themselves for not being able to come to terms with the moving ball. The swing in the air and seam off the pitch have left them with sleepless nights.

The Lord’s Test victory was no doubt an exception and any team playing in these conditions would have had a morale-boosting advantage to dent the English ranks even further to strengthen their presence in a full five-match series.

But India having squandered that gain by losing the third Test at the Ageas Bowl seem to be wandering around with another batting disaster that we witnessed here at Old Trafford on the first day as Stuart Broad and James Anderson prodigiously swung the ball.

Not too pleasing a sight to savour to see one batsman following the other in a matter of minutes. Only technically sound batsmen manage to handle such a situation. Somehow a great majority of the Indians and Pakistani batsmen seldom succeeded in English conditions.

The Indians however do not have happy memories of their visits to England. Here at Old Trafford more so because in their eight Tests here they have not won any, not even when Vijay Merchant, Mushtaq Ali, C.K. Nayudu and Vinoo Mankad were at their best.

Nor when men of such great strength and calibre like Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Dilip Vengsarkar and Sachin Tendulkar and the spin quartet of Bishen Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar and Srinivasaraghavan Venkataraghavan ruled.

I covered Sachin Tendulkar’s first of 51 Test hundreds here in 1990 and cannot forget the determination he displayed while batting to save the match.

In 1956, the England off-spinner Jim Laker from Surrey captured 19 wickets in the Ashes Test against Ian Johnson’s side. That was long way away.

But memories of Indian visits to these shores however come rolling back. It was here at this venue where the great innovator of stroke play Mushtaq Ali scored 112 on the 1936 tour to become the first Indian to have scored a Test century outside India.

A series which was played minus their best all-rounder on the tour — Lala Amarnath Bhardawaj — the first century maker in Test cricket for India and whose sons Mohinder and Surinder later represented India.

Amarnath’s first century was scored at the Bombay Gymkhana in 1933-34 series against the visiting MCC team. He was obviously the first-choice batsman on the 1936 tour to England under Maharaja Raj Kumar of Vizianagaram. On the tour before the first Test Lala had already scored over 600 runs and taken 32 wickets but despite that he was sent back to India on disciplinary charges accused by his captain of disobeying him.

After gaining Test status India came out to England under Maharaja who was Bhopinder Singh of Porbandar who was not much of a cricketer and had to stand down before India’s inaugural Test at Lord’s in 1932 to be replaced by C.K. Nayudu.

Karachi’s Jeomal Naoomal had opened the batting for India in that first ever Test for India scoring 33 and 25 in the Test. Naoomal later after partition led the Hindu Gymkhana in Karachi and one of Pakistan’s coaches and my coach too when I was in a camp in 1957 at the National Stadium for a month along with Haseeb Ahsan, Nasim-ul-Ghani, Saeed Ahmed and Ijaz Butt.

Naoomal later migrated to India along with his family and died in early eighties in Mumbai.

The 1932 team also had Mohammad Nissar, a genuine pace bowler who took five wickets on debut and there were brothers — Wazir Ali and Nazir Ali and Jehangir Khan, father of Majid Khan and Asad Jehangir Khan.

Not since India have been led by the Maharajas and with the passing of time have progressed in leaps and bounds to produce great names of the game.

The present team under M.S. Dhoni who was once a ticket-checker at the Ranchi railway station in Bihar, appears to be a lot more of a professional outfit and richer by any standards than their predecessors must have been and obviously have over the years achieved laurels all round, even winning two world titles.

But when it comes to facing England in England the story remains a lot more familiar like when they first played here in their formative years.

Published in Dawn, Aug 12th, 2014