A few weeks ago the Spin was polishing off a far from unpleasant bowl of chicken penne in a restaurant in Birmingham with - who else? - Ian Bell. We got talking, as you do over pasta, about Muttiah Muralitharan, at which point your column half-jokingly aired the possibility that when Bell walks out to bat in the first Test at Kandy - starting on December 1 - it will be Murali waiting for him at the other end, fiendishly tossing the ball from one hand to the other and itching to take his 709th Test wicket, the one that would move him above Shane Warne on the all-time list. Bell chuckled at the prospect, but not nervously. Heck, there might even have been a hint of relish.
When England fly out to Colombo on Thursday evening, he will be well aware that this quiet three-Test series, squeezed into the space of 22 days to allow the players Christmas at home, is of huge personal significance. For one thing, he will bat at No3, the position he craved all summer while batting at No6 and - on three occasions, thanks to the nightwatchmen - at No7. And for another, he is desperate to show that the sweet form which made him top-scorer in the NatWest Series against India will henceforth be the rule rather than the exception. In short, the way he handles Murali could dictate whether his international career sticks or twists.
Bell has always divided opinion. The Spin should know. A couple of years ago it publicly predicted he would end his Test career with 8,000 runs at an average of 45 - and was mercilessly mocked by several readers and one or two colleagues. Others thought it was a reasonable call, but his current stats (2,035 runs from 30 Tests at 42.39) suggest we could be in for a photo-finish. The Sri Lanka series could tell us how handsomely England's investment in him will pay off.
What has always been striking about Bell is his ability to catch the eye. In a completely ignored section of Behind the Shades, Duncan Fletcher remembers Bell's call-up in New Zealand in early 2002 as cover for Mark Butcher. "It took just one indoor net in Wellington for [him] to become the talk of the squad," he writes, rather tediously failing to stick the knife in for the sake of a good newspaper serialisation.
And in Stephen Chalke's delightful biography of Tom Cartwright, The Flame Still Burns, Cartwright waxes lyrical about what a good "ball-player" the former Warwickshire batsman Jimmy Ord was. He goes on: "Probably Ian Bell is closest to him, and Michael Vaughan, a beautiful stroker through the covers." Cartwright, who died earlier this year, is the man Ian Botham and Viv Richards still credit with setting them on the road to greatness. He knew what he was talking about.
Yet the reason Bell continues to divide opinion is his tendency to mix single-figure scores with bigger ones. In 23 of his 54 Test innings he has been out for fewer than 10; in 20 of them, he has passed 50. A lack of grey shades has encouraged views that are black or white. And then he went and scored more than 400 runs in the one-dayers against India and batted - consistently - like a dream. It felt like the start of something exciting.
Granted, Bell's figures during the five ODIs in Sri Lanka recently were mediocre, but then so were those of almost every other batsman on the slow, low heaps of Dambulla and Colombo's RPS. And close observers will have noted that Bell's ball-playing, to borrow from Cartwright, generally remained of the highest quality. On the last night of that trip, he had dinner with Kumar Sangakkara and Dougie Brown - Warwickshire colleagues present and past. "We were all laughing," says Bell. "Kumar was saying, 'like, how have you not got any runs in this series?' because I was striking the ball really well."
He just needs to remember that. By Christmas, Bell will have batted at No3 - arguably the toughest position of the lot - in the four hardest series an England player faces: away to Australia, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. If he can average 45 against Murali on his home turf, those 8,000 runs will come quicker than even the Spin could have hoped.
Extract taken from The Spin, Guardian Unlimited's free weekly take on the world of cricket. Subscribe now.
