Welcome to India, England!

New Delhi: Former fast bowler, Bob Willis had brilliantly summed up the English batsmen's fate against the turning ball a little over a decade ago, saying that their batters were at sea against anybody who pretended to bowl slow.
If the Indian batsmen have a history of discomfort against the moving ball, the English batsmen did their reputation of struggling in alien conditions no harm by going down by over a hundred runs in the first one-dayer in Hyderabad, in what has been hyped up as the revenge series for the world champions.
Having consistently tasted success over the last couple of years which included India's total and complete demolition in England, Alaistair Cook's men were expected to turn over a new leaf in their subcontitental endeavours; however it was not to be.
Even though it might be too early to put the 'dead and buried' tag on the Poms as of now, but the fact that they came nowhere close to overhauling India's total, might just set the trend for the rest of the series.

England will also have to contend with the fact that they are yet to win an ODI series in India since the David Gower led team triumphed 4-1 in the 1984-85 series.
They have also lost 12 of their last 15 games against India in the opposition's backyard which included a 5-0 whitewash not that long ago under Kevin Pietersen's leadership in 2008.
One might like to add that had it not been for the Mumbai attacks, the English might have suffered the mega embarrassment of a 7-0 annihilation.
So, what exactly has resulted in the Englishmen coming unstuck in India over the years gone by especially in ODIs.
It's probably a case of having lost the battle in the head more than anything else, when it comes to dealing with spinners, for that matter even the part time ones, as was proved by Ravindra Jadeja's figures of 3/34 on Friday.
Apart from the fact that the English pacers are not as effective on flat pitches and that the sun is a bit too strong for their liking in this part of the world, it's always been the slower ones that the Englishmen have failed to decipher.
As the teams gear up for the second match of the series at the slow and low Ferozshah Kotla on Monday, one might wonder how the story could be any different for England this time around.