Monday, December 10, 2001 A bearded Jain sadhu in a white sheet wafted around the Indian players at practice, handing out sandalwood blessings and predictions of centuries like they were boiled sweets. Funnily enough he had disappeared by the time the England coach pulled up in mid-afternoon. This was one smart sadhu. Being associated with Ashley Giles and his dodgy ankle could easily backfire.

But, for the moment at least, Giles seems fit to play in the second Test which starts tomorrow. He rolled that hefty arm over in the nets, hobbled in that hobbly way of his and seemed full of beans. Even Duncan Fletcher was chirpy. "There is a very good chance that he'll play. We've just got to make sure there has been no reaction. He seems very upbeat, in fact he says that he hasn't felt like this for some time."

If Giles does play it will be his first Test since he appeared at Edgbaston for the start of the Ashes series, because of a veritable smorgasborg of injuries. After finally recovering from them, he took one wicket in the warm-up match against India A – Ajay Ratra with a little tickle to James Foster – before managing to bruise his heel and rule himself out of the first Test last week.

It will be a nice homecoming for Giles. The pitch at the Sardar Patel stadium, where England lost the opening game of the 1996 World Cup, is made for spinners - red crumbly soil, dust, no grass. The earth is just waiting for the salivating jaws of Harbhajan Singh and Anil Kumble to drip.

Giles will be bowling in tandem with someone who has had a right royal tour to date. Richard Dawson has got up journalists' noses with his facetious answers to questions, and got up India's collective nostrils with four wickets at Mohali in his debut Test. When you add a pinch of praise from Duncan Fletcher, that is quite a triple.

"Everyone says the two Indian spinners played well, and they did," said Fletcher at his press conference in the bowels of the stadium, where a pleasant aroma of the nearby toilets filled the air. "But let's not forget there was a young Englishman, 20 years of age, who's only played about 20 first-class games, who if the catches had been held would have finished up with seven wickets.

"He'd been criticised for bowling badly at Hyderabad but came out and bowled well at a Test match against world-class batters."

Another more surprising subject got a namecheck from Fletcher. Cardiff. More particularly Cardiff wickets which Fletcher got to know well during his Championship-winning spell as Glamorgan coach.

"As soon as Cardiff gets a low, slow, turning wicket, there's a big hue and cry in the paper, but there should be a few more Cardiff wickets. There should be a few more wickets around that give a true contest between batter and bowler instead of having wickets that are seaming around a lot."

It wasn't Cardiff but the heat of Galle where England came in for a roasting in the first Test of the Sri Lanka series last winter. And Fletcher hasn't forgotten. "We got quite a mauling there, but the guys stuck to it, and we came back from there. Hopefully we can do it again."

Though, as he pointed out, in Sri Lanka there is only one leading spinner coming at you, albeit a whirling, electric-elbowed one called Muralitharan. In India you have Kumble and Harbhajan, the Bangalorian and the Punjabi, the patka and the moustache, the Lillee and Thomson of 2001.

Giles for James Ormond is likely to be the only change to the England team – a like-for-like exchange as both have taken just one wicket on the tour. Mark Butcher and James Foster keep their places, despite unspoken pressure from the sidelined Michael Vaughan and Warren Hegg.

Fletcher is coaxing Foster through a traumatic tour like a doting dad. Catching practice today was no box of chocolates, more a box of spanners, each one hard and tricky to smother. But Fletcher was laughing and relaxed, cheering Foster's catches. His high-five to a man who must feel miserable after a dodgy debut was sweeter than all the sugary thalis in Gujarat.

That the sweet taste of victory might be England's in five days' time is more difficult to imagine.

England (probable) 1 Marcus Trescothick, 2 Mark Butcher, 3 Nasser Hussain (capt), 4 Graham Thorpe, 5 Mark Ramprakash, 6 Andrew Flintoff, 7 Craig White, 8 James Foster (wk), 9 Richard Dawson, 10 Ashley Giles, 11 Matthew Hoggard.

Tanya Aldred is assistant editor of Wisden.com

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