The England team led by Alastair Cook, along with the support staff, arrived here early this morning from Dubai for a series of four Test matches and two T20 Internationals against hosts India, says a report in The Indian Express, adding that key middle order batsman Kevin Pietersen, added to the team as the 17th member following a patch-up with his teammates after being dropped midway through the home Test rubber against South Africa, had arrived a few hours earlier.
“Pietersen, who played for Delhi Daredevils in the Champions T20 League before the team got knocked out in the semi-final, arrived late last night from South Africa while the other team members came from the UAE where they had practiced for a few days at the ICC's Global Cricket Academy,” says a report, adding that Pietersen was readmitted into the team on October 18.
“He was ousted from the team in August after sending mobile text messages with unflattering comments about the then captain Andrew Strauss and teammates to two rival players – Dale Steyn and AB de Villiers – during the second Test of the last home series against South Africa at Headingley, Leeds,” adds the report.
Meanwhile a Times Of India report says that Pietersen, who was in South Africa, playing for the Delhi Daredevils in the CLT20, will be flying to Mumbai from Johannesburg and arriving in the city at 11 am. The rest of the England team though would be arriving only at 2.30 pm from Dubai, where they had a three-day training camp, said a BCCI official.
It is learnt that the 87-Test veteran was supposed to wait for the rest of his team members at the airport for three and a half hours, but later changed his mind. He will be escorted by a BCCI official to the team hotel.
KP, as he is famously known, though would have loved to have a hit in the middle but England cancelled a scheduled practice at the Cricket Club of India (Brabourne Stadium) on Monday afternoon, ahead of their three-day match against the Suresh Raina-led India A outfit.
According to a report in The DNA, it was a tightly knit England team that last won a Test series in India.”They had no stars, in the absence of Ian Botham and Graham Gooch, and relied on their own resources. David Gower's England team of 1984-85 had no coach, no analyst, no doctor, no security officer, no masseur. There was a physiotherapist, but he refused to massage anybody, even the fast bowlers after a long day,” says the report, adding that so they had to work things out for themselves, and did, winning the Test series 2-1 after everything had seemed stacked against them, from the pitches to politics to the all-day journeys by train, plane and bus that used to constitute a tour of India.
What were the preparations? "Absolutely nothing," according to Graeme Fowler, England's opening batsman and now the coach at Durham University, where Andrew Strauss among others have passed under his wing. "The day before the tour we went to Lord's and you were given a blazer, and either it fitted or it didn't."