Anyone who has followed the progress - and the Spin uses the term advisedly - of England's one-day team in recent years will know that dawns tend to be false and flattery full of deception. After all, was it not as recently as February that David Graveney suggested we should apologise to Duncan Fletcher after they won the Commonwealth Bank Series? (When England flopped yet again at the World Cup, sorry seemed a harder word to say.)
Now, they are 2-1 up against India, a side who hammered them 5-1 in 2006, and the temptation is to get excited again about a form of the game that has always had as much appeal to English cricket followers as the suffragettes did to Bigoted Great Great Grandfather Spin. In part, this temptation should be resisted: India are ranked merely fifth in the ICC's one-day table; unlike England, they failed to reach the Super Eights at the World Cup; and their fielding and running between the wickets are a joke, only less funny.
But it is hard to fight off the feeling that England's performances at the Rose Bowl, Bristol (where they came within a couple of Dimitri Mascarenhas sixes of exacting revenge for Lord's 2002 and chasing down 330) and yesterday at Edgbaston represent a more genuine renaissance than the freakish win in Australia.
With all the usual caveats about not jumping the gun, tempting fate, or counting our chickens, various ingredients are threatening to fall into place. First came the return of Andrew Flintoff, who was below par at the World Cup - blame his post-Ashes blues - but was England's most economical bowler at the Rose Bowl and their only penetrative one at Bristol. His batting remains a worry, but when he bowls like a specialist, that worry is more than manageable.
Then there has been the coming of age of Alastair Cook, Ian Bell and Jimmy Anderson. Cook has never quite been taken seriously as a one-day player, despite making 39 and 41 in a hopeless cause against Sri Lanka in 2006. But he has enough strokes to pierce the infield during the powerplays and he is obsessive about getting better: his stunning catch to dismiss Yuvraj Singh in the first game showed how hard he has worked on his fielding.
Bell, who has scored 269 runs in three innings with a strike-rate of 88, is approaching the form of his life. And he will get there once he learns how to take complete control of an innings, rather than simply anchor it. His parallel growth with Cook has almost, but not quite, erased memories of Marcus Trescothick.
As for Anderson (8 wickets at 13 with an economy-rate of 3.80), a top-class performance is now the norm. After being hit for four fours in his second over by Sourav Ganguly, he took three for 16 in 43 balls, most of them against Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and Yuvraj. For such a shy man, he is revelling in the responsibility of leading a young attack. He is suggesting that the World Cup of 2003 was not an aberration.
More than all that, England are showing nous, a quality that was grievously lacking in the Caribbean. They have been pleasantly surprised to discover that players like Zaheer Khan, Munaf Patel and RP Singh make them look like gazelles in the field, and they have finally woken up to the joys of the hustled first run. They are taking the one-percenters seriously.
There remain plenty of weaknesses, among them Chris Tremlett's invariably hittable first spell, Monty Panesar's minor identity crisis, and Matt Prior's tendency to get to 30 then hit one in the air. But it would take a curmudgeon not to recognise the strides England are on the verge of making. Plenty can go wrong, and the lead in this series might yet change hands again. But there is an unmistakable sense of optimism in the air. And when was the last time you could say that about this team?
The above is an extract from Lawrence Booth's free weekly email, The Spin
