Three of those four, Ghulam Ahmed, Vinoo Mankad and Hemu Adhikari, retired from Test cricket after that series and the 1959 touring party included a lot of unproven players.

The team consisted of 17 players, and that rose to 18 when Abbas Ali Baig was recruited at the end of the Oxford University cricket season to take the place of the injured Vijay Manjrekar.

England began nervously against Surendranath and Desai, but Peter May hit 106 and 50s from Ken Barrington, Martin Horton (in his first Test) and a quickfire 73 from Godfrey Evans meant that the hosts ended the first day at 358 for six wickets.

India began very slowly, and Tommy Greenhough, in his first Test also, conceded 16 runs in his first 16 overs, also taking the first wicket, that of Contractor.

Two wickets for Fred Trueman were followed by late rain, and on the third day Borde was unable to resume his innings, having broken a finger the previous evening.

India's batting, with Nadkarni also handicapped by injury, subsided against hostile bowling from Trueman, Brian Statham and Alan Moss, and the innings of 206 took 375 minutes and 102.5 overs.

Contractor, hit by Statham, batted with a cracked rib but still made almost half of India's first innings runs, with a determined 81.

England made six changes and one of the newcomers, Harold Rhodes, took wickets with his fourth and twelfth balls in Test cricket to reduce India to 23 for four, with new wicketkeeper Roy Swetman taking three catches.

After early wickets for Moss and Trueman, India rallied with a partnership of 69 between Borde and Umrigar before the off-spin pairing of Brian Close and John Mortimore finished things off by five o'clock on the third day.

India batted poorly against Trueman and Statham and only a late partnership of 58 for the eighth wicket between Tamhane and Surendranath brought any comfort.

And the Indians became the first touring side to lose against the Minor Counties representative side since the West Indian cricket team in England in 1928, largely as a result of a remarkable unbeaten 202 by Phil Sharpe that enabled the Minor Counties to reach a target of 334 with only four wickets lost.

Of the younger batsmen, Apte and Kripal Singh each had one very large innings, but Ghorpade and Jaisimha failed to score a century.

Gupte, heralded before the tour as the leading leg-spin bowler in the world, disappointed, and failed to take 100 wickets in the season: his aggregate of 95 was the highest for the tourists, however.

It suggested that the problem was deep-seated, in that the side appeared only rarely to play as a team, though talented individuals made occasional contributions.

Under a new captain, Gulabrai Ramchand, India gave a much more creditable account of themselves in a home series the following winter against Australia, losing the series only 2–1, though the single victory came in a match at Kanpur on a newly-laid pitch that off-spinner Jasubhai Patel exploited to the extent of taking 14 wickets in the match.