'Until they start playing well in the subcontinent they can't call themselves the best team in the world and definitely can't be judged against some of the other great England sides.'

So declared Geoffrey Boycott, world-renowned pundit and Geoffrey Boycott impersonator, amid the blood-letting that followed first Test defeat in Dubai last week.

Certainly this was not a performance to enhance their status as the world's number one Test team. And it seems widely accepted that they have to win in all conditions to be measure up against their peers and against the giants of history.

But why?

It is not clear what great England sides triumphing on the Asian subcontinent that Boycott and other perfectionists have in mind.

Of 24 previous Tests away to Pakistan over half a century, how many have England won?

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The answer is: two, on a first outing in the country in 1961, and a second at Karachi in 2000 which ultimately clinched a famous 1-0 series win for Nasser Hussain.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the best England team before Strauss' was that of the late 1950s. And that generation won one Test of 12 in India, losing three. While England's overall record in India is a bit better than that in Pakistan, no England team has been consistently successful visiting a team who only realised in the early 1990s that the purpose of Test cricket was not simply to get a draw.

Sri Lanka, meanwhile, have not been on the scene long enough to have hosted one of the few really good England sides, though they too fell afoul of Hussain 11 years ago.

So, it seems there are a few points to make ahead of the second Test in Abu Dhabi.

First, this series was always going to be very difficult in a new country against resurgent opposition without good preparation. The resounding nature of last week's defeat only confirms the fact.

Second, it is likely they will now lose the series. The old English frailty against spin has recurred with a vengeance. With Ian Bell, the best technical player of slow bowling in the side, sporting a look of '05-retro cluelessness against Saeed Ajmal, they will struggle for runs while the demands on their own bowlers in those conditions are extreme. Unless Pakistan bat in a way that will arouse suspicion, another positive result may not be possible.

None of this means, however, that England are suddenly undeserving of their title as top dogs. It took more than one good performance to win it and will take more than one atrocious one to take it away.

As pointed out above, there is no great English history of success on the subcontinent against which they must measure up.

And it is not as if other nations' greatest have done much better either. Clive Lloyd's West Indians were famously stymied by the subcontinental pitches. The 1960s South Africans never played in unfamiliar conditions for obvious reasons. And even the new Australian Invincibles tended to find things harder going in Asia than elsewhere.

On the other hand, India are brilliant on the subcontinent. Yet their current experience in Australia suggests this is not enough.

In truth England can lose this series and still consider themselves the best in the world today as well as comparable to any England side to have gone before. They will simply have to buck up their ideas at home, particularly against South Africa, if they want to hold their reputation for much longer.

This skip through the archives also provides a reminder of quite how good an achievement it was for Hussain and Duncan Fletcher to bring home back-to-back series success in 2000/2001 with such sparse resources.

Peter May