We’re picking an England XI comprising the players we invested in the most.

Turns out we’ve latched onto quite a few England spinners in recent years. We have always loved Adil Rashid very, very much while Moeen Ali rather snuck his way into our affections and shows no sign of being shifted any time soon.

But then there’s Monty Panesar.

The Paleogene Period is a funny one. Spanning 43 million years from the end of the Cretaceous Period to the beginning of the Neogene Period, it’s the span of time no-one really gives a shit about because it’s right after the dinosaurs.

And indeed it does sound boring when you put it like that. But it isn’t. It isn’t at all.

Because the Paleogene Period followed the mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth, there were suddenly a lot of gaps in the ecosystem to be exploited. The species that survived consequently diverged into new forms and species at unprecedented speed. It was a mad, mad time.

It resulted in a whole bunch of animals that are still around today – horses, whales, bats and primates. However, there were also a whole load of other animals that had a fine old time for a few million years but then died out – sabre-toothed cats, woolly rhinoceroses and terror birds to name a few.

The period between England’s 2005 and 2010-11 Ashes wins was a bit like this. It brought us Stuart Broad and Alastair Cook, who stuck around and still remain at the very forefront of our cricket-consciousness, but it also gave us the likes of Ryan Sidebottom and Monty Panesar, who maybe aren’t.

Variously remembered as a terrible batsman, terrible fielder, terrible Mastermind contestant and one-dimensional bowler, Panesar was in fact a guy who spent much of that neither-one-thing-nor-the-other period accumulating five-fors like toilet roll at the outset of a coronavirus crisis.

Let’s draw some comparisons.

Moeen Ali has taken five five-wicket hauls, which is the same number as both Phil Tufnell and Ashley Giles.

If we turn to seam bowlers, Andrew Flintoff took three five-fors, Chris Woakes also has three and Ben Stokes has four.

A bit further up the list, Matthew Hoggard took seven, Steve Harmison took eight and Darren Gough took nine.

Over the course of his now somewhat overlooked Test career – almost none of which has made it onto the official ECB YouTube channel – Monty Panesar took 12 five-wicket hauls.

But it’s also worth remembering that even a single Panesar wicket was something to savour. Remember the grin, the run and the airborne five?

Monty Panesar was a Test cricketer whose success brought almost unparalleled joy.

In another universe, these five cricketers are the backbone of the England Test team.

A handful of players make it in Test cricket. Others get picked and aren’t good enough. Then there are the weird ones; the ones who get a few games, look the business and then for some weird reason or another disappear again when you were absolutely convinced that they’d become fixtures in the side.

Here are five players who seemed for all the world like they were going to become England mainstays in the 2010s… but then didn’t.

Gary Ballance

23 Tests, four hundreds, average 37.45

Gary Ballance is 30 years old. He has made 40 first-class hundreds and averages 47.40 and he can’t get into this England side.

Mental.

Ballance was, for a time, our favourite England batsman. He was solid and reliable and we greatly admired his stony-faced, doughy tenacity.

Then suddenly he wasn’t solid and reliable.

We’ve previously made the bizarre case that Ballance was poorly treated by England through their repeated selection of him and we largely stand by that.

Steven Finn

36 Tests, 125 wickets at 30.40

A perfectly respectable Test record, but let’s be honest, we all expected more. Much more. An unfair amount more really.

Finn was the man who was obviously – obviously – going to take the baton (there’s an opening-the-bowling baton?) from James Anderson and Stuart Broad, yet at the time of writing it looks like his Test career may have ended long before theirs.

Run-up tweaks, ebbing confidence, overthinking and injuries have all taken their toll. When England toured New Zealand last year, he travelled as a commentator, which is so depressing we can’t even properly think about it.

Haseeb Hameed

Three Tests, average 43.80

An 82 against India on his Test debut and an unbeaten 59 with a finger that was broken into “two pieces” (according to Trevor Bayliss) in his most recent Test innings.

All was rosy, at which point he started batting badly enough to be relegated to Lancashire’s second XI. After a year or so of that, they declined to give him a new contract.

Hameed is only 22. He’s now moved to Nottinghamshire. He’s going make it back, isn’t he?

Isn’t he…?

Monty Panesar

50 Tests, 167 wickets at 34.71

Look at that Test record and imagine it attached to a 31-year-old spin bowler, because that’s when Monty Panesar’s England career ended. These days he’s reduced to impossibly excruciating appearances on TV quiz shows.

Rangana Herath took 397 wickets after his 31st birthday. Graeme Swann took 170. Jimmy Anderson, a pace bowler, has so far taken 264. Even Ryan Harris, whose body was basically just dry, fragile bones bound together with old sellotape that had long since lost its stick, took 104 Test wickets after the age of 31.

Monty Panesar, as rhythmic and grooved a finger spinner as you will ever find, took zero.

It all rather drifted away from him, like a nice arm ball. There was a bit of something in the Monty Panesar has played one Test X number of times argument, but it was only a flaw, not uselessness. The real problem was beyond cricket where life just got the better of him for a while there.

James Taylor

Seven Tests, average 26

Let’s end with the saddest one, shall we? (Don’t blame us for the sequencing – blame the alphabet.)

Everyone remembers the 2012 version of James Taylor because Kevin Pietersen slagged him off and that is a very memorable thing. People also remember the 2016 retirement version of James Taylor because he had an unexpected heart thing and it was very shocking. No-one remembers the period from 2014 onwards when it honestly felt like he was mastering batting and maybe even believed that himself.

When Taylor was recalled to England’s one-day side that year, he had worked his way to the third-highest List-A average of all-time. The world’s busiest batsman was then a shot away from making a hundred against Australia in the 2015 World Cup before reaching three figures against them later that winter. This isn’t a period of one-day cricket anyone in England is keen to remember. The following summer, he made 291 against Sussex.

Taylor played five more Tests. He took a few blinding catches and made a couple of seventies, but this writer at least felt there was a lot more to come. Unfortunately, there wasn’t. He was 26.

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We love Monty Panesar – absolutely love him – but his Celebrity Mastermind appearance was not a triumph.

The pressure clearly got to him during the general knowledge round and he appeared to lose the ability to comprehend English sentences.

What followed was a sort of word association exercise where Monty blurted out whatever happened to be passing through his brain each time John Humphrys stopped talking.

Monty gave some very fine wrong answers. It’s actually quite hard to say which wrong answer was the finest. We’d probably narrow it down to these two.

Number one

Monty was asked which season of the year was described by the poet Keats as “a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”.

After a string of terrible answers and passes, this question presented him with an opportunity because it pretty much boils down to ‘name a season’.

Presented with a one-in-four chance of getting an answer right, Monty went with “Oliver Twist.”

Number two

Monty was asked the title of the first volume of CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

We dearly hope that among all the other rejected names for the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis briefly and inexplicably considered “CJ Lewis.”

You can see Monty’s whole capitulation via the iPlayer or the bulk of the general knowledge round on this Twitter video.

< 1 minute readAs in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got anklosing spondylitis or anything.

Like many people, we have a soft spot for Monty Panesar.

Firstly, he lent his name to our assistant.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, he was for a time exceptionally good at bowling spin for England.

Now he’s back. Back at Northamptonshire at any rate. He also hopes that he’s pretty much back to himself after being blighted by paranoia and other mental health problems in recent years. There was that bladder control thing as well.

His low-key county return is therefore what we like to call ‘a good thing’.

Barney Ronay has written a nice piece for The Guardian about Panesar. We agree with much of what he says – not least because he agrees with much of what we’ve said.

He takes issue with the ‘Monty Panesar hasn’t played X Tests, he’s played one Test X times‘ line for similar reasons to us – namely, that if that one Test is a perfectly good one, it’s really not that big a problem. Also, since when has one-dimensionality been such a flaw for a bowler?

They say the animals are always the first to know, so we’ll ask Monty’s namesake how this latest comeback is going to pan out. We’ll get back to you once we have the details.

< 1 minute readNo, honestly. An actual spin bowler as well, not just a batsman specialising in round-arm dob. It was the second division, but these are desperate times – we have to make the most of whatever we can find. We’re basically Wombles.

The spinner in question is Monty Panesar and at the time of writing, he’s taken 4-18 in 14.2 overs. We’re taking this as confirmation that Panesar is the greatest spin bowler in the history of cricket. You don’t dismiss Daryl Mitchell, Tom Kohler-Cadmore, Ben Cox and Jack Shantry on an unpredictable pitch without being in some way exceptional.

< 1 minute read

People can overcomplicate things sometimes. Pyramid tea bags? You can make a perfect cup of tea with an ordinary bag, so this is not a worthwhile development.

Okay, maybe that’s not precisely the right analogy here. We do accept that there is something in the Monty Panesar has played one Test X number of times argument, but you should never confuse a flaw with uselessness.

There are days when Panesar might benefit from a little experimentation, but that doesn’t mean he’s broken, which is how people sometimes interpret that. He’s not a mischievous imp of a spinner, he’s a line bowler – and he’s a damn fine line bowler who gives the ball a rip. The minor flaws don’t cancel out his massive qualities.

If conditions aren’t in his favour, Panesar is consistent and doesn’t bowl bad balls. If conditions are in his favour, he takes wickets by the absolute bucketload. He has more five-wicket hauls in his last four Tests than Andrew Flintoff took in his entire career.

In this Test, Panesar has obliterated an Indian batting line-up to the extent that they’ll be asking Duncan Fletcher to show them the forward press and the sweep. Sometimes it’s important to be thankful for what you have, because it bloody well does the job.

< 1 minute readWe could have gone with “Monty Panesar’s back“, but we’ve actually done that joke about him twice before. You have to draw the line somewhere. We fully expect you all to now tell us that we’ve drawn that line incorrectly.

But let’s not bicker about whether a joke should be repeated word-for-word, again and again, until everyone loses the will to live; or with slightly different wordings, again and again, until people lose the will to live – this is a time for rejoicing. Monty Panesar is playing and entirely unsurprisingly, he’s taken four wickets. If we had the power, we would crown the man ‘king of good times’.

But what does his performance mean for the match?

The problem with an England spinner taking wickets on day one of a Test match is that he also stabs at the confidence of his batting team-mates, causing untold damage. Maybe it would have been better for the team if Panesar had wheeled away ineffectively and India had declared on 560-1. Not a team player. Drop him for the next Test.

The pitch is certainly doing a bit, but R Ashwin has 60, so it is at least possible to bat on it (at least late in the day, when the aggregation of marginal losses has come into effect). The batting approach should perhaps be similar to the last match – minimise damage until the going’s slightly easier.

Incidentally, we exclude Cheteshwar Pujara from the above analysis on the grounds that he is impossible to dismiss and very possibly an entirely different species from the England batsmen.

< 1 minute read

England drop Monty Panesar readily. Whether it’s because of form, the pitch or ‘the balance of the side’, they don’t seem shy about leaving him out.

Maybe the decision will be vindicated, but he seems to have been collateral damage following a line of thinking that betrays England’s lack of confidence in the batsmen. Broad went home and they wanted Finn to replace him, because he’s promised so much recently. However, they didn’t want a tail of Finn, Panesar and Anderson. Bresnan instead of Finn? No, Bresnan instead of Panesar.

England still have Samit Patel’s left-arm spin, so this isn’t perhaps as eye-catching a decision as the guy who ordered a fried spam, egg and cheese sandwich in the bacon butty shop the other day. It’s just a feeling we get – that Monty Panesar is easy to drop.

< 1 minute read

This statement was made my Shane Warne. He famously said that Monty Panesar hadn’t played X Tests but one Test X number of times. This is accepted as great insight all too readily.

It’s a nice catchy soundbite and it’s from Shane Warne, but does it really have much merit? It seems to rely on this notion that spin bowlers have to be wily and full of mystery, but as far as we can tell Monty was winning England a lot of matches doing things his way. There’s no harm in looking to improve, but Monty is sometimes ridiculed and belittled despite a Test record that would be the envy of most spin bowlers.

Imran Khan never said that Glenn McGrath hadn’t played 124 Tests, but one Test 124 times. Dennis Lillee never said that Shaun Pollock hadn’t played 108 Tests, but one Test 108 times. There’s more than one way to take wickets, no matter what your style of bowling.

Ian Salisbury played several different Tests.

Today’s image was taken by Sarah Ansell and indeed most of the images we will be using from now on will have been taken by Sarah Ansell. She and her photos can be found at www.sarahcanterbury.com. Get in touch with her if you wish to republish one.

< 1 minute readAs in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything.

It may not be the first time we’ve made that joke – it may not be the first time we’ve made that joke about Monty Panesar – but come on. Some events warrant special attention.

So what are the pros and cons of Monty Panesar being in England’s XI for the second Test in Abu Dhabi?

Pros

Monty Panesar is playing.

Cons

None.

So there you go, it’s a 100 per cent brilliant decision with no downside.