London warms up

Adapting to different conditions. We journalists ask the cricketers how they go about it all the time, but we have to do it too. A few days ago I was in Bangalore, where the multitude of people on the street hinders walking/running, the sun rises at 6am (I think) and sets 12 hours later. After an 11-hour flight, I'm in a little village within the London commuter belt. I'm spoilt for choice when it comes to jogging paths, the sun rises at 4.30am (I think) and sets only after 9.30pm. Someone slipped a takeaway menu for an Indian restaurant through the letter flap one evening, but they'll have to wait for my patronage. I'm not craving Indian food just yet.

The commute into central London by train takes about an hour, and I noticed an advertisement for the World Twenty20 at one of the stations. The poster had a picture of an elderly gentleman on it. He's wearing a bacon-and-egg tie and has the St George's Cross painted on both cheeks. The caption reads, "Everybody's game". I've not yet got the impression that Twenty20 is everybody's game in England. The IPL wasn't advertised as a tournament for all ages in India. There were no pictures of old people on hoardings. A lot of them were already hooked - my grandmother used to stay up late to watch the 8.00pm games until their finish. Instead, we had the players - Kevin Pietersen, Jacques Kallis, Zaheer Khan etc - with absurdly intense expressions glowering at us from billboards.

At another station on the way to London, though, there was a bigger advertisement for a more significant event this summer in England. We've been reading articles on the Ashes in the English broadsheets for what seems like eons now, so I half-expected the publicity for the greatest-sporting-rivalry-ever to be rather in my face. It hasn't been that way so far.

Perhaps I haven't been here long enough to form a well-informed opinion though. I met an Indian journalist who has been here for a while - is nine months long enough? - and he vented about how Ashes-obsessed this country is. I suppose the English feel the same way about India and Sachin Tendulkar. There were bits of it in evidence, though. During the pre-tournament press conferences, an English journalist asked Kumar Sangakkara what he thought of Ravi Bopara as a batsman. Sangakkara gushed that Bopara was an excellent talent. Another asked Graeme Smith to pick a winner for the Ashes. Smith chose to be boring and sat on the fence.

Some of the teams have been playing practice matches this past week, but Monday was the first day of official warm-ups. Ironically, the most low-key teams, Ireland and Netherlands, played the most thrilling game. It ended in a tie and had to be decided by a Super Over. Scratch that, the official term for it is the "one-over eliminator". The ICC may have borrowed the concept from Sir Allen Stanford's tournament, but they probably don't want it call it what he did.

Netherlands have a left-arm spinner, Pieter Seelaar, who has a curious way of celebrating a wicket. He stands in one place and sways gawkily with his arms by his sides. It appears rather … dainty, especially after watching the Sreesanth's delirious run and Fidel Edwards' crotch chop during the IPL.