Twenty-five years ago this month, Tony Greig went out to bat at Eden Gardens in Calcutta with a fever and made a famous matchwinning century. Today Marcus Trescothick, who had been weak enough on Thursday to spurn the chance of easy runs against a club team, made a century that would have been just as memorable - had he not been sawn off by a stupid, hasty umpiring decision. He was robbed. When Trescothick makes a hundred, England lose. But this is one of those random factoids that say nothing about anything - except the lack of support any England batsman is liable to receive. Today he was just magnificent. Unlike Greig, who was reduced to a grafter by his illness, Trescothick played just the way he always does, only more so.

Nasser Hussain had said beforehand that today would tell which of his young team would thrive under the pressure of a huge crowd. And that wasn't the only pressure on Trescothick. Without their finisher, Graham Thorpe, the only men who could get England near India's total were the top three - Knight, Hussain and Trescothick himself. They all had to bat in the twilight, the trickiest time of day. Knight went first ball, to a poor decision; Hussain was shaping well when he got a dodgy one too. At this stage, as Lawrence Booth wrote, the only way England could make a game of it was if Trescothick made 120. So he did.

He got there by sweating and sweeping. His bright-blue pyjamas were soon stained navy, and a couple of times he tilted his head and the perspiration poured out of his helmet like water from a tap. But somehow this young man who plays like an old sweat kept a cool head.

A few years ago Bob Woolmer wrote an article setting out the five kinds of sweep shot required in the modern one-day game. Trescothick played them all today: the textbook sweep, rolling out to deep square for a single; the slog-sweep, sailing over midwicket; the lap, squeezing between the keeper and short fine leg; the fetch or pull-sweep, smacking a length ball from outside off; and the reverse sweep, last played by an Englishman on this ground 15 years ago when Mike Gatting got out to Allan Border and carried the can for losing the World Cup.

Trescothick didn't just conquer the atmosphere - he virtually obliterated it, as a fiercely partisan crowd subsided into sullen silence. But he could not beat the umpires. The end of non-neutral umpires, due in April, cannot come soon enough.

But if Trescothick deserved better, England as a whole did not. The lower order allowed the umpiring to get to them, like Greg Rusedski yesterday. The management picked a curious team, preferring two gentle spinners to the cutting edge of Andy Caddick, and attaching more weight to Paul Collingwood's cheap three-for on Thursday than to Ben Hollioake's proven aptitude for the big stage. They ended up including all their journeymen and leaving out four of their biggest talents - Thorpe, Caddick, Hollioake and Owais Shah. Judging by the bounce Flintoff extracted and the ease with which Darren Gough shook off five months of rust (even his batting was its usual bovine self), Caddick might have done quite well.

Tim de Lisle is editor of Wisden.com.

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