The Last Flight to Nagpur

India has many many fine towns and cities but Nagpur is not one of them. A nondescript industrial sprawl 800 kilometres east of the coast at Mumbai, it's bang in the middle of the country but very far from the nation’s heart. The town is unremarkable, largely unloved and famous in cricketing circles for having produced the odd outrageous greentop. It is, in fact, the Derby of India. Which, a cynic would tell you, is exactly why Jagmohan Dalmiya chose it for the First Test – revenge for all those years of English slights, perceived and real.

Tonight at 9.30pm, on the last possible flight, the final remnants of the Test circus touched down in the dark: the Sunday-newspaper and magazine men, with less pressing deadlines than the rest; Owais Shah fresh (if that’s the right word) from a West Indies-to-India epic to bolster England's depleted batting; and the last footsoldiers of the not-so-Barmy Army. They looked a bit glum, but then having forked out a few thousand quid to end up in Nagpur on a Tuesday night, with your team predicted to get ground into the red dust tomorrow … well it’s hardly reason to break out the champagne. ‘Shah and the Stragglers’: we could almost have been a ‘60s pop group.

By 11pm the main drag in Nagpur was as quiet as India gets, which is not very. The higgledy piggledy stained-concrete shops were dark except the paan joints and a box-like, neon-lit Biryani restaurant, glowing like a green and pink ice cube. Down the sidestreets, black as tar, the only light came from the single headlight of the odd rickshaw, like an oncoming train in the movies. The England hotel was as sombre as a church.

Perhaps it was just the weirdness of all of these Englishmen from Rochdale and Runcorn and Reading arriving in one of India’s slower backwaters, a place most never dreamed existed before the schedule was announced. Perhaps it was the late-night touch down. Perhaps it was the malaria pills sending me potty. And perhaps Super Fred really can do perform a miracle. But on the last flight to Nagpur there was an ominous feeling that we were about to watch something nasty happen.