Mumbai, April 8 (IANS) Moeen Ali, the retired England allrounder, has tipped Ben Stokes & Co to win the five-Test home series against India after a close contest. The much-hyped series gets underway soon after the ongoing Indian Premier League (IPL) 2025 with the first Test beginning at Leeds on June 20.

"I think England will win a tight series," said Ali, the Utility Man of English cricket, who quit all forms of international cricket in September last year. One of the top white-ball experts in the World who has won two World Cups in 2019 and 2022, Moeen is currently representing Kolkata Knight Riders in the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2025.

It often goes under the radar that the Birmingham hero is also the third-highest wicket-taker in Tests among England spinners with 204 wickets after the legendary Derek Underwood and Graeme Swann.

"India are a brilliant team, but there are a number of them who will be visiting England for the first time. It may look easy, but actually, you need to go to England a few times to do well…it has been the case with Virat (Kohli) also," Moeen Ali told Telecom Asia Sport (www.telecomasia.net) in an exclusive interview.

This will be India's first red-ball series since the Border-Gavaskar Trophy series 2025-26, when they lost 1-4 to Australia. It will be a test of character for India, whose red-ball prowess will again be tested away from home.

India will be playing matches at Leeds, Birmingham, the Lord's, Manchester, and The Oval in the five-match series starting on June 20 and ending in the first week of August.

Reflecting on India’s last series in England in 2021-22, Moeen said the final result could have been different if India had not abandoned the series with the last match left because of the pandemic. "We were playing some terrible cricket in the first four Test matches, but when the decider took place after a gap of quite a few months, England looked a different team," he said.

The England white-ball teams, meanwhile, received a pounding at India’s hands when they came visiting for an ODI and T20I tour ahead of the ICC Champions Trophy earlier this year. After riding high till their World T20 success Down Under, the England team had looked vulnerable in both the 2023 ODI World Cup in India and the last T20 World Cup in the US and Caribbean.

Moeen Ali felt a major factor for this had been the constant chopping and changing with the team in the post-Eoin Morgan era.

"The mindset has changed after Morgan’s departure. He had stuck by us through the rough and the smooth, and someone like (Trevor) Bayliss also helped a lot. See, people often don’t realise how good a player a (Jason) Roy, (Jonny) Bairstow or Morgan was.

"During that period, it was very difficult to make a change in the squad. You don’t throw in youngsters just like that – unless they are players like Harry Brook, who is brilliant. This creates an atmosphere of insecurity in the team, and it reflects on the performance as well," said Ali, for whom KKR is the third IPL franchise after Royal Challengers Bangalore and Chennai Super Kings.

Talking about IPL, the 37-year-old Ali, who has piled up five Test hundreds and 200-plus wickets, feels his future lies in franchise cricket. He fondly remembers his four seasons with Chennai under Mahendra Singh Dhoni. "I have played for them for four seasons, three under MSD and one when we had (Ravindra) Jadeja starting as captain before he again took over. I could bat regularly at No.3 and was lucky to be a part of the winning squad twice," he reflected.

The cricket fraternity in England acknowledges him as a cult figure in Birmingham, where he was born in a family of Pakistani descent. A mention doesn’t fail to touch a chord in the reticent cricketer as he says: "I come from an inner city in Birmingham and hence, people there can relate to me a bit more. Whether I am playing for Birmingham Phoenix or England there, I have always got a great reception.

"I wanted to inspire people from different backgrounds and would like to believe that I have done my two bits," he signed off.