There is a rhythm to life in India, or rather there are two - quick and very slow. The motoring is quick, except when it is very slow. The talking is quick, the bureaucracy is not. The bowling is mostly slow, and so is the batting. England's batsmen, all tasting Test cricket in India for the first time, didn't get it. Like bad dancers, they tried to impose their own rhythm, and turned into clodhoppers. The frustrating thing is that yesterday England did seem to have got it. It wasn't a great performance but it was conducted at the right tempo. The bowlers played real Test cricket, within their considerable limitations. The opening batsmen crept along at a run every three minutes, got through those tricky 20 overs, and made Deep Dasgupta look as if he was in the entertainment business.

Today, Butcher and Trescothick settled in again, but their rhythm was all English, not Indian. There's nothing wrong with playing your shots, and Steve Waugh's Australians have repeatedly shown how fast scoring wins matches as well as pulling the crowds. But it is significant that the one place that their approach has backfired is India. This is a part of the world where patience is not a virtue but a necessity, as the players would know if they had to queue for their own visas.

England threw this match away, after getting first use of a blameless pitch, in two dizzy spells - when their first innings evaporated from 170 for 2 to 238 all out, and then today when the first three wickets went down in the space of half an hour. All it took to shape the day was two pulls and a cut. Tinu Yohannan is an unusual seamer, both tall and skiddy, but the openers had seen enough of him to have worked that out.

Nasser Hussain has done so well in India that he can be forgiven almost anything, but that cut, quite apart from being ill-judged, was unnecessary when he was already half-way to treating Kumble with the same domineering contempt that the Aussies reserved for Phil Tufnell.

Trescothick and Thorpe can be largely excused. The only Englishman to pass 100 in the match, Trescothick has already maintained his record of never having a wholly bad series. Thorpe did even better, striking the right tempo as well as some runs, and shaking off the rust that has been in his system since his calf injury in June. But Mark Butcher and Mark Ramprakash, who had made giant leaps in their last two Tests, took a step back here, Andy Flintoff turned into a bowling allrounder, and James Foster was a poor man's Chris Read. Atherton and Stewart were missed more than Gough and Caddick. Where was Michael Vaughan when England needed him?

When they needed to bat for two days, England couldn't even manage one - their second innings, like the first, was all over before the new ball was due. By mid-morning at home, they had hurtled to their sixth defeat in seven Tests. There will be two more before Christmas if they don't get the rhythm right.

Tim de Lisle is editor of Wisden.com.

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