Watching England in one-day internationals away from home is rarely easy but, after two heavy defeats in Rajkot and Indore, the next five games and the long hours spent between games on the train are starting to look tougher by the day.But away from the cricket itself the first week of England's epic odyssey across the length and breadth of India has thrown up the usual array of the fantastic that tend to become the norm on a tour of this amazing country.Take my TWO TV appearances for instance...
The first was relatively straightforward. The man from BBC News was so stunned that I had decided to follow KP's troops across the subcontinent in the delights of Indian Railways' Sleeper Class that he came down to film me at Ahmedabad railway station en route from Rajkot to Indore.
Taking a simple snap in India still often draws a sizable crowd so you can imagine the interest that was caused by a TV camera pointing at an Englishman slouched on some baggage destined for a faraway location!My second appearance was far stranger and completely unexpected.After a knock at my hotel door the night before England's opening game I was about to open up and tell the chai boy I didn't want another cup of his delicious tea when in burst five Rajkot police officers accompanied by a TV crew!The hotel manager was with them apologising profusely and explained that they were searching all the rooms in the hotel.I never got to the bottom of what they were searching for but whilst the entire contents of my rucksack were ignored my Dad's 60th birthday card enjoyed specific attention! What viewers would have made of a senior police inspector opening and closing the card to show an elephant playing a shot with a cricket bat goodness only knows! Whilst the interest, or more importantly lack of, in India's Test series with Australia has been well documented this definitely hasn't been the case in this ODI Series so far.In both Rajkot and Indore, and now in Kanpur, hotel beds right across the price spectrum have been increasingly tough to come by.With many of the venues slated for this tour rarely seeing international cricket fans from all over the respective states have flooded to the cities to completely fill hotels that are already very busy coping with the start of India's traditional wedding season.As the manager of my hotel in Indore succinctly put it: 'I wish the city suffered from cricket fever more often'!Interest in the games hasn't stopped at the lack of hotel rooms of course.Both games so far have been complete sell-outs with 32,000 packing into Indore's fantastic Maharani Usharaje Trust Cricket Ground and, supposedly, 18,000 squeezing into Rajkot's slightly less salubrious Madhavrao Scindia Cricket Ground.Even in an empty ground the view afforded in Rajkot isn't what one would expect from an international cricket venue. The bamboo canes and ropes used to hold up the temporary awnings combined with the permanent barbed wire topped metal fence make watching the cricket difficult enough.But when you add a crowd who have cleverly adopted the 'one-person-out, four-people-in' technique during the first session of play to swell the actual attendance way above 20,000 then watching much of the game becomes virtually impossible.Mind you, when you lose by a whopping 158 runs maybe that's no bad thing!