ENGLAND’S cricketers have some thinking to do and in a hurry. Having come home, maybe briefly, maybe not, the great temptation will be to take the easy way out and stay in England while the dust settles in Mumbai - all being well.

I suspect that the one thought uppermost in their minds is that but for the timing of the terrorist attacks, either the Middlesex Twenty20 side or the England team could easily have been among the victims. The Taj Mahal Palace hotel was England’s base at the start of the tour and was due to be their base for the second Test just before Christmas. The players will feel that they have had a lucky escape.

Had they been in residence, there would no doubt have been more security in evidence and it might well have been that such an attack would not have been planned for that time. It is said that such attacks are aimed at “soft” targets but it will be of little consolation to the players that because of their status as international sportsmen in India, they are not quite such a soft target as the Taj’s normal clientele of well-heeled businessmen.

Also, if one takes the view that such attacks are largely random in their timing and there is the chance that a number of fanatical young mujaheddin might not have read the sports pages while planning such a mission, then all it takes is the most unfortunate coincidence and - international sportsmen with high security in attendance or not - you have a nasty problem. Imran Khan’s recent remarks that terrorists do not target cricketers are unlikely to be enough of a guarantee to any of our men with doubts about the wisdom of returning to play the Tests. If ever it happens that a cricket team is in the wrong place at the wrong time, it will not matter a jot what their status is in sporting circles.

It is down to the security experts to help the boards and the players decide what to do next. They cannot afford to be gung ho and will have to exercise all due caution. How much do they have to go on? Ahmedabad, the venue for the first Test, hardly has a trouble-free record in the not-so-distant past; Chennai, the new venue for the second Test, is far enough south to suggest that it is unlikely to be a terrorist target.

What other intelligence is out there? Before last week, the world’s security services, it seems, could only come up with enough to say that Al-Qaeda or their supporters were planning something big somewhere.

However, I do not think that our cricketers are more at risk now than they were before the Mumbai atrocities. If they go back, they know they will be protected by even more security than they have seen over the past few days. It would be good if the show were to go on. For one thing, I do not think you should hide away from what is at the moment the possible threat of a threat.

It evokes memories of our experiences in 1984. We arrived in India in the early hours of October 31 and had put our heads on our pillows at the Taj Palace hotel in New Delhi for the odd hour or two before news reached us of the assassination of the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, by her bodyguards.

We expressed our condolences to the Indian nation and on the advice of the high commission we left the country for 10 days or so, playing some cricket in Colombo while India was in national mourning. There was no threat to us as a team, it was merely that we would have been forbidden to do anything of a cricketing nature during that official mourning period, so we headed to Sri Lanka to keep busy and avoid any chance of offending our hosts.

We returned to India and picked up the itinerary, reaching Bombay, as it was then, to prepare for the first Test. Two nights, I think it was, before the Test we had a great evening at a drinks party with the deputy high commissioner, Percy Norris. The next morning he was shot dead at traffic lights on his way to work.

Each time, the murderers struck relatively close to the team’s hotel. Norris’s killing, with the strong British link, focused the minds of the players much more. Again we took advice from the authorities. Their view was that it was an isolated act that did not represent a threat to us as a cricket team.

As captain I toured the rooms at that same Taj Mahal Palace hotel and spoke to all the players, informing them that we were to carry on and would be going to the Wankhede stadium to practise, as arranged. Graeme Fowler, never one to miss a good line, said: “What? Target practice?” At a team meeting that evening it was clear that some of the players were not happy to stay. We had what they call a full and frank exchange of views and we all stayed, losing that first Test after a bright start but coming back to win the series 2-1.

A not dissimilar challenge faces Kevin Pietersen and his team. The circumstances are different but the principle remains the same. I am not asking them to take anything that might be termed an unreasonable risk, and they will be getting plenty of advice as to the current level of risk, but the challenge, which was admittedly hard enough without recent events, is to get out there and try to finish the tour on a winning note.

To achieve that would be doubly satisfying - they would have cocked a snook at both the India cricket team and the terrorists.