If anyone had any doubts that cricket is a magnificent game - or that England (as Britain is called when kitted out in whites) and India are magnificent, humane, manly, kind, resilient, fraternal nations - these were dispelled over the last five days in Chennai (né Madras).

There have been few Test matches more special than the one that concluded there yesterday, and cricket is only part of the reason for that. I write here as an Indian who moved to England as a 16-year-old, and who, even after becoming a subject of Her Britannic Majesty, cheered always for the Indian cricket team - especially when they played against England. Norman Tebbit, one of Maggie Thatcher's less enlightened ministers, had contempt for my type; but with apologies to Kipling: what should they know of cricket who only England know?

And yet... as the Test match began I found that I was shouting for England. I had, for the first time in my life, passed the infernal “Tebbit test” - which, in a nutshell, decreed that immigrant Britons must not cheer for the land of their forefathers when teams from said lands were playing teams from Britain.

What made me change my ways? Relief, of course, that there would be cricket played. (I am fanatical about the game.) But there was more. So touched was I - so deeply moved - by the decision of the England team to return to India after the terrorist attacks, that I willed them to win.

When England's young opening batsman Alastair Cook read out “an open and public statement of support for the Indian people following the tragic events in Mumbai” I found it hard to resist the courage, the poise, the sheer decency of this England cricket team. There is a kind of Englishman who is admired by Indians, who was admired, even, in the old colonial days. I know that because my parents' generation speaks of the type. Amid the boors and oiks that England is so good at producing (and was so good at exporting to its colonies), there is - and always has been - the Upright Englishman.

Eleven of them took the field in Chennai, and for three days and a half outplayed an Indian side that had been expecting no contest. And so I cheered for Strauss, and Swann, and Monty, and Pietersen - yes, Pietersen. Let no one say he's not English. England lost the Test, in the end, but what of that? They were snuffed out by magic that was, somehow, appropriate for the occasion - magic conjured to meet the standards of eleven men of courage, eleven Upright Englishmen.

Tunku Varadarajan is opinions editor of Forbes.com and a professor at Stern Business School, New York University

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