Security personnel guard the Bhubaneswar hotel where the cricket teams of England and India were staying for the Cuttack ODI

Given what has just happened in India, it is monstrous for the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) even to be thinking about sending the team back again. It’s all very well to say, “we mustn’t let the terrorists win”, but what about the families who have lost loved ones?

And what about the players’ wives, who will be afraid to turn on the television for fear of what they might see? For me, the whole idea just seems disrespectful, insensitive and immoral.

No one should underestimate the scale of this disaster. If the players go back next week, they won’t be able to escape the inquests into what happened. The Indian media operate on a scale 20 times the size of our own, and will be working overtime to find out how 10 terrorists could just waltz in and shoot up two of the best hotels in the world. The investigation will be all over the papers, the radio, the television screens and the internet, so you will hardly be able to move without being reminded of what happened in Mumbai.

Sport is supposed to be enjoyable, entertaining and essentially fun. But I don’t know how any of that can be possible when India is burying more than 200 victims of terror. In fact, the ECB are showing a lack of moral judgement by pressing ahead with all these meetings and security inspections. The whole thing is just too raw.

People have been trying to draw parallels between this disaster and the London bombings of July 2005, and pointing out that the Ashes series carried on regardless. The two situations are completely different.

London was an attack on the public transport system, which was never going to be a threat to an international sports team. This one took out a hotel where the players were due to be staying only a few weeks later.

Even more alarmingly, it was specifically targeted at people with British or American passports.

If the ECB leave the decision of returning up to the players, they will be putting them in an awful, invidious, pressurised position. That wouldn’t be fair on anyone. Even from a purely cricketing point of view, the tour is already in a mess. The players are due to arrive in India early next week. Then, on Thursday, they will be straight into a Test match, having had hardly any time to acclimatise. Some of them — Andrew Strauss, for example — won’t have had any cricket at all. How can anyone be prepared or properly focused on the game?

More importantly, we don’t yet know enough about the Mumbai disaster. It is only a couple of months since the Islamabad Marriott was taken out by a lorry-load of explosives that went off just outside the front gate.

In the circumstances, it seems bizarre that the Indians are trying to reschedule one of the Test matches to Mohali. It is the closest ground to Pakistan, only a matter of 25 miles from the border. To even talk about flying there is ridiculous. It is time for the ECB — or, if not them, the International Cricket Council — to stand up, stop messing around and show some leadership.