Opinion: Sixteen years ago in Manchester, New Zealand lost a cricket test to England after Monty Panesar, the spinner, took six wickets for just 37 runs. It was a memorable performance, and Panesar was duly hailed as the best English left-arm spin bowler of his generation.
Spin bowling is a subtle art that requires great technique, thoughtful tactics and the courage of your convictions. Get it wrong and you can easily look hapless. But get it right and you’re a hero.
The problem with adulation, however, is that it can go to your head. Too much of it and the receiver can begin to think the crowd loves them not for their particular sporting skills but for themselves in their totality.
And when the sporting career comes to an end, the crowds disappear and the applause stops, there is often a desire to go in search of it in other fields. Panesar played his last test for England 11 years ago, and after retiring from first class cricket in 2016, his public profile quickly began to diminish.
So it was a surprise earlier this month when he returned to the headlines with a bold mission statement.
“When I played for England there was so much support for me,” he explained, and now he was going to return the favour by coming to the aid of the embattled working class.
With this new saviour role in mind he announced that he was a prospective candidate for the Workers Party of Britain, essentially a vanity operation set up by George Galloway, that stalwart admirer of the Soviet Union, Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin.
In one of this first political interviews, Panesar was asked his opinion of the WPB’s policy to leave Nato. This appeared to come as news to the former cricketer and he began to prevaricate and flounder, like a nervy tailender reluctant to face a demon fast bowler.
Sensing that he might not know what Nato actually is, the radio interviewer asked him if he understood its role.
Like an errant schoolboy mouthing any old nonsense in a verbal exam, the former spinner suggested that the UK’s membership of Nato was stopping it from dealing with illegal immigration. Nato, of course, has as much involvement in migration control as it does in motor sport or flower arranging.
In a sense, who cares? A former international cricketer makes a fool of himself: Ian Botham made a profitable side-career out of doing exactly that, and he now sits in the House of Lords. Yet Panesar’s pronouncements point to the post-knowledge, post-fact world in which we’ve increasingly come to live.
Not knowing about the policies of the party he supposedly represents did not inhibit Panesar any more than not knowing about virology or epidemiology stopped social media influencers from spreading conspiracy theories during Covid.
Despite that adage about never mixing sport and politics, there are plenty of sportspeople who have made it as politicians. The great footballer George Weah was until recently the president of Liberia, Vitali Klitschko, onetime heavyweight boxing champion of the world, is currently the mayor of Kyiv, Sebastian Coe was a Tory MP before going into sports administration. And New Zealand has a rich history of former sportspeople going into politics.
Panesar is clearly not part of that tradition. Instead, he represents a more modern cult of celebrity, the idea that being famous trumps being informed. Too naive to realise that Galloway is a demagogue, and too ignorant to know how much he doesn’t know, he is in danger of being hit for six every time he opens his mouth.
That would be a sad outcome for a man who came to believe that he was admired for who he is rather than for what, on the cricket pitch, he once did.
Andrew Anthony is an Observer writer and is married to a New Zealander.
