On the face of it, this would appear to be a classic match-up. The World Cup winners, going head to head against the recently crowned World Twenty20 champions. Delve deeper, and despite changes in personnel of both outfits after their respective triumphant runs, and it still appears a classic match-up between the irresistible force and the immovable object.

Not for nothing are the Australians the World champions. It is a sobriquet they have earned -- for keeps, many might be tempted to think! -- through a decade and more of exceptionally entertaining and efficient cricket.

Their outstanding run in the Caribbean to an unprecedented third World Cup came just when the rest of the world was beginning to think they were bridging the gap. They have played little cricket between April and now; there is little to suggest, though, that their hegemony is under any serious threat, even if skipper Ricky Ponting is on temporary leave with a hamstring injury.

While Australia's march in the Caribbean came as no great surprise despite the ordinary form they had taken with them to the World Cup, India's epochal tryst with the Twenty20 World Cup was as dramatic as it was unexpected.

A young side with little experience of Twenty20 cricket, and under a captain with no experience of leading the country, carved its way through the draw, stacking up fancied big-name victims with tremendous elan and aplomb.

Back to business

Hardly have Mahendra Singh Dhoni's boys -- and most of them were, in truth, no more than that -- recovered from their exertions in South Africa and the resultant euphoria than it is time to get back to business, and against the most dominant cricketing nation in the world.

The seven-match Future Cup one-day series, which will kick off at the floodlit Chinnaswamy stadium on Saturday, will be Dhoni's first assignment as one-day captain of a team inclusive of three former skippers. It will be interesting to see how the Jharkhandi handles a side full of acknowledged superstars, a far cry from the Twenty20 outfit with its onus on youth.

Equally interesting will be how the big three -- Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly -- react to being put under perceived pressure, more than anything else, by the Protean success of the young guns.

It will be in the realms of the fantastic to even start to think that any of them will feel the need to prove anything to anyone else apart from themselves. All of them were in sublime touch at various stages of the one-day series in England, and it is inevitable that, refreshed after a three-week break, they will also be sucked into the vortex of momentum and enthusiasm generated by the Twenty20 success.

A firm, hard suface, prepared with meticulous care by curator Narayan Raju, should offer the perfect stage for India's celebrated batting order to dictate terms against an Australian attack wearing a formidable look about it, but missing the craft of Nathan Bracken and the pace of Shaun Tait for different reasons.

One-day cricket remains, and will continue to remain, a game dominated by the batsmen; the bowlers, however, will welcome the prospect of reasonable pace and appreciable bounce from a splendid-looking surface.

Serious scrutiny

The return to the one-day side of Harbhajan Singh -- nursing a stiff neck -- and Irfan Pathan is bound to attract serious scrutiny as they link up with the stars in England as well as at the Twenty20 World Cup to lend teeth and cutting edge to an attack marshalled by the left-arm pace duo of Zaheer Khan and Rudra Pratap Singh.

Neither Ponting, nor indeed Mike Hussey's absence -- the hammy seems to be spreading like the plague in the Aussie camp! -- will make India's task any easier. Stand-in skipper Adam Gilchrist will be desperate to make up for an ordinary Protean sojourn, while Indophile Matthew Hayden has already shown spectacular early-season form.

The war of words, no longer an Aussie trait alone as India have shed meek submissiveness and embraced an aggression bordering on brashness, has set the series up beautifully, without a ball being bowled. Hostilities, in every sense of the term, will begin the moment 'Play' is called.