When you don’t play cricket for a while, you’re even more hungry to get back out there. It’s been very strange not playing cricket and being with the lads for such a long period of time but with the group that we’ve got and the camaraderie that we’ve developed, everyone just gelled and clicked straight away when we met up in Abu Dhabi – it was as if we’d been together since the Ashes.

Initially, with the long break, I was like, ‘Oh, this is quite nice – a bit of golf, a bit of training’ – some downtime for a mental and physical refresh. But by the end of October, I was like, ‘Alright, I’m ready to go back now and I can’t wait to play cricket again.’

Our training in the UAE was typical Baz and Stokesy. It was very short and sharp every day but in a way where we still get in everything that we need to. It was a really beneficial 10 days. Jimmy and I were saying yesterday that we feel like we’re in a good place ready to go.

That fearless environment that Baz and Stokesy create starts from the camaraderie and the training. Just allowing everyone to bond so closely, you trust everyone in the team. It’s a weird thing to say but it means you’re not fearing someone taking your place. They’ve built an environment where you know that you’ll get your chance to play and impress as long as you do the right things and as long as you help the other lads out.

The message through everything that we do, whether it’d be golf – which is very competitive – or training or anything, is – ‘Go for it.’ ‘Alright, you’ve got a second shot onto the green from 250 yards, for eagle – go for it.’ Everything we do is ‘go for it’ and ‘don’t have any fear of failure’.

That’s been the message – it’s been no fear of failure, we’re here to entertain. If we don’t get it right, we don’t get it right. But at the end of the day, we’re here to entertain and win games of cricket as Ben and Baz would say.

Shoaib Bashir has fitted right in. He’s such a lovely lad. I’m probably not the most outgoing person but with all three of the new faces [Bashir, Atkinson and Hartley] I’ve found it really easy to sit down with them at breakfast and have a conversation. They fit into the environment really well and again testament to Ben and Baz for picking the right characters, the right individuals for the group.

Bash looks very good. He bowled really well in Abu Dhabi. He’s tall, a little bit similar to Ashwin – he’s got one that slides on, one that turns… he’s got a bright future ahead of him. I’ve been impressed by Tom Hartley as well. I’d not seen a lot of him before but he’s really impressed me. He does everything – he bats, bowls, and fields really well. I think his bowling in these conditions is going to be quite testing for India. He’s similar to Jadeja in that he fires it in. He turns it, skids it on – I’m excited to see how they go and I think they’re going to go well out here.

The prep’s been really good and on a personal level, I feel ready to go. In Abu Dhabi, I was bowling with Jimmy quite a lot just to see what he was doing and speak to him about how he’s going about things. We talked about crease position, seam position, reverse swing – we were using new balls for one spell, 60-over balls for the next spell and just trying everything that we could really.

I look at batters’ main mode of dismissal and if it doesn’t fit how I bowl, I’ll go back to my own strongest strengths and go that way. There are always certain individuals that have certain weaknesses to certain deliveries. If you go back to the summer, for example, David Warner around the wicket – it’s a no brainer to go around the wicket to him, so there are certain plans to individuals that I will go from ball one and stick at and there are other scenarios where I will just stick to my strengths.

In the past, Indian batters haven’t done that well against tall bowlers. If we get that bounce out here, that will be something I’ll think about but if the pitches don’t allow that, there’s a plan B, a plan C and so on. A few days ago I asked our analyst for footage of Glenn McGrath when he bowled in India, and he sent me some stuff from 2004 when he killed it out here. I was looking at how he got most of his wickets and I’ll take that with me into the games whatever the conditions are.

The tour in 2021 was probably the hardest eight weeks I’ve had as a cricketer. The environment – being so far away from home during a Covid lockdown, not playing amazingly well as a group – all of those things linked together made it a really tough tour. Even now you speak to the lads that played on that tour, and they’ll say, ‘That’s probably the worst I’ve been on’. It was tough. There was probably a tiny bit of scarring from that trip; our lads have spoken about Ashwin, Axar and Jadeja quite a bit and that’s probably because of that tour. The brand of cricket that we’re going to play is obviously going to be different this time. I hope we can get on top of them and push that tour to the back of our minds. If we can get on the front foot against them, then it will put us in a really good position for the rest of the tour.

We’re embracing conditions more than we did last time. In Abu Dhabi, we got the groundsman to rake two pitches and put sawdust down so they were ragging square from ball one. Tom and Bash were using brand new balls, something that Ashwin does sometimes. The lads were playing sweeps – even getting hit in the face sometimes – just playing shots that they would normally play on these raggers. There was no moaning, there were no excuses if they got out. It was just – ‘Next ball, crack on. How am I going to be better the next time?’ And that’s something that I definitely have noticed under Ben and Baz, the mindset is so different. We didn’t practice on turning wickets before the 2021 India tour. We didn’t practice on the wickets that we were going to face. We just had nice, comfortable practice. This time, it’s been more uncomfortable, more honest practice. That’s only going to bode well for us in this series I think.

The wickets that we’ve seen here in Hyderabad are a bit drier than what we saw in Pakistan last winter so reverse could come into play a little bit more. It’s definitely going to spin more than that tour. I had a look at the wicket on Monday and it looked ready. It looked like it was a day two pitch already. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns from ball one and reverses after 20 overs. It’s really dry out here. I’m excited to see our batters play because the way they’ve been playing in Abu Dhabi and the first few days here, it’s going to be exciting.

Until now, winning three-nil in Pakistan would be the pinnacle of what we’ve achieved as a group but winning in India is probably the hardest feat you can achieve as a team. If we can beat these guys, I feel like it will really put some fire in our belly to then go on and become the number one team in the world and play this brand of cricket while doing it.