Many Things we learned from India against

1. India are unconvincing favourites to lift the trophy

Was this such a great advert for the 50-over game? Tense and exciting, and that’s a start, but the bowlers-to-the-slaughter motif jarred. It increasingly looks India’s only tactic: bat the opposition out of the game. Their bowling attack is staggeringly weak, Zaheer Khan and Harbhajan Singh excepted, and it will be a challenge to keep making the 325+ scores required to win matches with that quintet. As such we can expect more bat-friendly surfaces in which keeping the score to 338 rather than 360 with a late flurry of wickets, as the admirable Tim Bresnan did, is as good as bowling performances get.

2. Derek Pringle, Alec Stewart and Darren Gough were wrong

Not so much something we learned as something we have known for a while, particularly in the case of Gough, who makes the wrong judgement so often it defies statistical convention. The three former England players said last September that Andrew Strauss should be excluded from the World Cup XV, and have already had their folly served up to them once or twice. But the captain’s magnificent innings on Sunday, specifically in Indian conditions, hammered a final nail into the coffin of dissent emphatically. It is true that England probably won’t win the World Cup, but it will hardly be because of their captain’s batting.

3. Teams will jettison their principles for the slightest edge

The root of England’s collapse was Ian Bell, doubling up with cramp and then getting himself out in dismal fashion (perhaps fearing that if he retired he would end up being cast aside like cramp-magnet Owais Shah).  If instead Bell had retired, he could have returned at seven after the mini-collapse and England still would have been favourites.  It was an episode that raised questions against his mental strength just when the matter had looked settled.  Also interesting was the dark under-belly of this new “professional” England outfit, shown by their merry padding up of Jonathan Trott as a runner, 18 months after they (correctly) refused Graeme Smith a runner at the Champions Trophy because, as Strauss said, “cramp is a conditioning thing, not an injury”.

4. Sachin Tendulkar is a liability in the field

It’s not like the old days, you know. Fielding is now a central part of the modern game. So how much longer can India carry their aged, short-limbed opening batsman in the deep? A couple of errors on Sunday effectively cost the hosts the game in the final analysis. He really is going to have to score a few runs to merit his place.

5. England are not 100% prepared

A number of events in the build-up showed that England have not (in fairness, could not have) prepared for this tournament as assiduously as they did the Ashes. Choosing a new opening batsman on the eve of the tournament is the most obvious. But there was an alarming sense after 99.5 overs on Sunday that Graeme Swann and Ajmal Shahzad were discussing what would happen in the event of the scores being tied. It was not quite so absurd as the 2009 WT20, when they qualified for the second round as a mathematical certainty only for Kevin Pietersen to refuse to count any chickens - ‘anything can happen in this crazy game’ - but an unsettling sight nonetheless.

Many Things we learned from India against