What better place than haughty Yorkshire to show England their place? This entire summer, the cricketing focus of the English media has been on the forthcoming tour of Australia, everything until then being only a preparation for the Ashes. It was a summer to thrash the subcontinentals and carry that momentum into another hemisphere. But England weren't quite as mighty as they thought they were, and how they fell. The difference between England and India recently has been that England, led by an inspirational captain, have tended to perform beyond their limited abilities, while India, with some awe-inspiringly talented players in their team, have been mercurial and have crumbled at the crunch. Sourav Ganguly, since he took over, has been trying to turn them into a professional unit, and it was likely that (a), sooner or later he would succeed, and (b), if he managed that during this series, India would have the measure of England.

India's win at Headingley is sweet not because it was their biggest victory abroad, but because every member of the side contributed to it. When the team management sits down to decide on selection for the next Test, there is not one single weak link they will be able to identify in the XI that played at Leeds. When was the last time you could say that about an Indian team?

Ganguly was roundly criticised for going into a game at Headingley with two spinners, for keeping out SS Das - who had made 250 in the tour game - in favour of Sanjay Bangar, and for daring to bat on a first-day pitch that had quite a few devils in it. But like a dream, everything worked. Bangar's gritty 68, which took all of five hours and neutralised the early advantage England might have got from the conditions, was easily worth a hundred in any other game, and he took the crucial wickets of Mark Butcher and John Crawley in the second innings with his accurate, if gentle, medium-pace swing bowling. India scored over 600 in the first innings and then their bowlers took the 20 wickets of which nobody had suspected them capable.

Ganguly's inspirational decisions were backed up by a team that played as if on a mission to exorcise 16 years of bad memories. Rahul Dravid's innings was key here. A glance at a scorecard will not indicate the value of his knock ten years from now, but in batting through the first day in difficult conditions, with immaculate technique and characteristic doggedness, he set a platform for the rest of the middle-order which they had never had. Sachin Tendulkar and Ganguly capitalised with hundreds of their own on the second day, but it was Dravid's innings that made them possible.

The other revelation in the game was Dravid's fellow Bangalorean, Anil Kumble. He averaged over 40 with the ball in Tests overseas and over 50 in England before this game, and he had begun to be regarded as the quintessential bowler of an era in Indian cricket where they could only win on dustbowl pitches at home. Deeply committed and an indefatigably hard worker, Kumble was magnificent on a pitch of uneven bounce, and he demonstrated that he could be a matchwinner anywhere in the world.

The Kumble of earlier years could be one-dimensional at times, not spinning the ball much and being much quicker than others who plied his trade. But it was evident at Leeds that, like fine wine, his craft has grown richer with the years. He flighted the ball far more than one expects from him, turned the legbreak appreciably and used the googly sparingly and wisely. His top-spinner, hissing off the pitch, was as deadly as ever, though the dismissal that epitomises how far he's travelled was that of Alec Stewart in the second innings: a loopy legspinner, it drew Stewart into his stroke, till he was almost reaching for the ball as it turned, kissed the edge and went to slip. It was a classic legspinner's dismissal.

India's weakness abroad has always been their inability to take 20 wickets in a game. Not only did they do just that at Leeds, but they did it in a manner that leads one to believe that it wasn't just a one-off, that they can do it again. Zaheer Khan, Harbhajan Singh and Kumble now consititute a force that can run through a side, a feeling that can spur the batsmen – and they are a considerable force – into believing that they are batting not to save the game but to win the damn thing. If India can take that feeling to its logical conclusion, the third Test against England at Headingley might well come to be regarded as a seminal moment in Indian cricket.

Amit Varma is assistant editor of Wisden.com in India.

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