As the cliche goes, girls’s Tests in India are like buses: you wait ages for one (on this case 9 years), after which two come alongside without delay. On Thursday, India start their mammoth effort with a four-day encounter in opposition to England on the DY Patil Stadium in Mumbai. After a mere three-day break, they are going to then tackle Australia on the Wankhede. Back-to-back Tests could also be frequent within the males’s recreation however in girls’s cricket, the place multi-day matches are hardly ever performed, that is the form of scheduling that makes you sweat simply fascinated about it.

And but it’s additionally a chance. The final time two girls’s Tests had been performed in the identical calendar month was again in August 2006. No one knew it on the time, however that two-Test sequence – between England and India – would subsequently achieve historic standing: it stays the final multi-Test sequence performed within the girls’s recreation.

Three months later, on the behest of the International Cricket Council, the Board of Control for Cricket in India took over from the Women’s Cricket Association of India as the game’s nationwide governing physique. Suddenly, India turned a mere bit-part participant on this planet of multi-day worldwide cricket. England haven’t performed a Test within the subcontinent in 18 lengthy years; Australia have waited practically 4 many years (since 10 February 1984, to be exact).

Despite all this, the elusive expertise of taking part in a Test in India retains its efficiency within the creativeness of the feminine cricketer. “It’s one of those bucket-list things that you want to do as a cricketer,” Heather Knight, England’s captain, mentioned final week.

It may also be a possible minefield. Knight’s predecessor Charlotte Edwards did the captaincy honours final time England performed a Test in India, from 21-24 November 2005 in Delhi. It was her first tour in cost; she needed to be taught on the job, quick, after her point out of staying in inns filled with cockroaches in her ESPNCricinfo tour diary sparked outrage among the many Indian press. It is troublesome to think about one in every of right this moment’s consummate press convention professionals making the same comment – however then, with the England and Wales Cricket Board nonetheless virtually a decade away from introducing girls’s central contracts, it was a unique period again then.

“There were power cuts, there were times when there was no shower,” remembers one other participant on that tour, the brilliantly proficient batter Claire Taylor. “We played the Test at the university ground in Delhi and I don’t remember there being much more than the odd spectator. There was no fanfare whatsoever about it.” England spent their evenings in the course of the Test sorting their washing, which had by some means received combined up with the Indians’ package in transit to the lodge.

“Anything can happen in India,” is the decision of Laura Macleod, presently director of Cricket at Central Sparks, who opened the batting within the Test alongside Edwards. Her recommendation to Knight and co? “You have to embrace it, and not get too hung up on controlling things.”

It’s a mantra born of non-public expertise: Macleod made scores of six and 16 within the Test, though few of her teammates fared a lot better throughout 4 troublesome, swelteringly sizzling days. Edwards – utilizing her tried-and-tested technique of all the time calling “tails” – had begun badly by dropping the toss; India racked up 244 for 5 on day one. “We never felt that we were in the game,” says Taylor. “I dropped Mithali Raj early on the first day [Raj was on 17 and went on to score 78], and they just built and built. I disattached a ligament in my right thumb by dropping that catch, so I was out of sorts for the rest of the tour.”

England fought again on the second day, bowling India out for 289; however a well-known face – the one just lately retired Jhulan Goswami – rapidly decreased them to 61 for six. By the time day three dawned, England nonetheless wanted 37 to keep away from the follow-on. They additionally needed to cope with one other crushing blow: X-rays revealed that their younger, fiery quick bowler had fractured a bone in her left hand and would wish to fly dwelling. Her identify? Katherine Brunt.

In the tip, England limped to 154 all out; whereas India’s declaration on the third night left them with an unlikely goal of 311 to chase down on the fourth day. “It was long before you would attack spinners – you would grind it down, grind it down,” says Macleod. “There were a lot of people around the bat getting very excited and very giddy. I didn’t last very long.”

By the afternoon session, with England already 4 down, it was all about digging in: Jenny Gunn (32 off 172 balls), Rosalie Birch (20 not out off 96) and Laura Harper (21 not out off 96) duly obliged, and the match led to a draw.

But England’s tour by no means fairly recovered: the Test was rapidly adopted by 5 one-day internationals, of which they misplaced 4. In the fourth, at Silchar, they had been dispatched for simply 50 by the may of Goswami. To make issues worse, the humiliation occurred in entrance of a 22,000-strong crowd, having fun with a specially-granted public vacation to observe what turned out to be about 90 minutes price of cricket.

By the fifth and last ODI, the England squad had been so overtaken by “Delhi Belly” that they may barely area eleven gamers. “It was up for grabs who would be 11th and who would be 12th,” says Taylor. “The day before the match, Shaggy [Caroline Atkins] and I both left the pavilion at the same time to go on a warmup with the rest of the girls, and whoever had to return to the pavilion to use the toilet the soonest was 12th man. And that was Shaggy.”

“It wasn’t our best tour,” she concludes, ruefully.

Knight’s workforce can be hoping for a smoother expertise – though the indicators, up to now, aren’t good. England’s A workforce, who performed a three-match Twenty20 sequence in opposition to India A final week, completed up so tormented by sickness such that Knight and the coach, Jon Lewis, needed to impose a strict quarantine for anybody transferring between the A camp and the principle England squad (Charlie Dean missed the primary T20i because of this). England could have triumphed 2-1 within the current T20s, however after scuttling the guests for 126 in the final match on Sunday, with 4 gamers falling to golden geese, the Indian bowlers will seemingly have their tails up. Plus ça change ….

Now, the England batters have to modify mindset and bear in mind how one can play multi-day, red-ball cricket – oddly sufficient, a format with which their 2005 counterparts had been way more acquainted than this crop can be. Progress in girls’s cricket just isn’t all the time linear.

Still, the BCCI’s choice to host back-to-back Tests gives some reassurance that we’d simply be witnessing a revival of the longer format for ladies. Win, lose or draw, let’s hope it doesn’t take one other 18 years earlier than an England facet get the possibility to tick taking part in in a Test match in India off their bucket record.

• This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket electronic mail, The Spin. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.