Seven years ago, England visited the subcontinent for their first Test series since 1992 and came away with pinch-me-please wins in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The results were the making of Duncan Fletcher's reputation as an international coach, a reward for the old stagers (Atherton, Stewart, Thorpe, Hick, Gough and Caddick) who had suffered throughout the 1990s, and apparently a seminal moment in the development of English cricket. From now on, south Asia would be the place you scored runs rather than suffered them.
As so often with English sport, generalisations based on one-offs (or even two-offs) did not stand up to scrutiny. Narrow or not, this morning's defeat in the first Test at Kandy was their sixth in 13 in the subcontinent since they left Colombo with a four-wicket win in March 2001. Only three of those games have been won, and two were in a series against Bangladesh, who at one stage looked as if they might spring a horrible surprise at Dhaka. The brutal truth is that the Ring of Fire triumph at Mumbai more than 20 months ago remains the glorious exception.
If England took two steps forward in the winter of 2000-01 through a combination of Fletcher's forward-press scheme, Nasser Hussain's bloody-minded leadership and some imaginative bowling from Darren Gough, they have since taken three back. And unless they can turn things round in Colombo and Galle over the next couple of weeks, the excessive fear struck into the hearts of pasty-faced Poms by the subcontinent will begin to assume pre-Fletcher proportions once more.
This seems counter-intuitive when you think back to some of the moments along the way. Andrew Flintoff and Matthew Hoggard bravely shouldering the burden at Bangalore; Craig White scoring his only Test hundred at Ahmedabad; stirring rearguards at Galle and Kandy; hundreds for Ian Bell and Kevin Pietersen at Faisalabad; Alastair Cook's debut and Hoggard's tirelessness at Nagpur; even Bell's double here.
But if that gives the impression that England's batsmen have generally prospered, it is misleading. More than any factor - the inexperienced squad in India in 2001-02, Murali's doosra in 2003-04, the post-Ashes hangover in Pakistan in 2005-06 - the inability of the batsmen to book in for B&B has cost them dear. In 15 Tests on the subcontinent, England can boast one score of more than 134 (Marcus Trescothick's 193 at Multan in a game Pakistan somehow won), and eight other hundreds. When you consider that there have also been 43 half-centuries, you can see the problem: jobs are being left half undone.
It is harsh to single out Bell, comfortably England's best player in the Test that has just finished. But his knocks of 83 and 74 were all too symptomatic: attractive, and not quite enough. The bottom line is that England have lost a Test in which they reduced the opposition to 42 for five on the first morning. Back in 1999, England themselves slumped to 45 for seven in the first innings against New Zealand and still won. And yet New Zealand came back to take the series. England are going to have to reverse their recent form on the subcontinent if they are to follow the Kiwis' lead.
Extract taken from the Spin, Guardian Unlimited's weekly take on the world of cricket
