Sikhs celebrate England's new cricket icon

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The Times August 05, 2006



England's Monty Panesar and the ball with which he dismissed his hero, batsman Sachin Tendulkar JOHN CASSIDY





Sikhs celebrate as England's new cricket icon bowls over the fans
By Will Pavia, Steve Bird and Patrick Kidd




INSIDE Monty Panesar’s turban, a lock of uncut black hair is bound up with a tiny wooden comb, inlaid with a silver sword. On his right wrist, which unfurls as he rounds the wicket, presaging the delivery of a spinning ball, is a small steel bracelet.

This is England’s newest cricket icon, the first Sikh to find a place in the national sporting pantheon, and the first Sikh in any walk of life to arrive in the public eye wearing the adornments of his faith.

While England’s cricket fans hail a new hero, by turns adulated for his spin bowling and mocked for his fielding, Britain’s half a million Sikhs are celebrating a breakthrough.

“The Sikh religion emphasises equality and respect. We have no difficulty integrating into any community,” Indarjit Singh, the director of the Network of Sikh Organisations and the editor of the Sikh Messenger, said.

Although these small communities are thriving, there has been a feeling that one could not reach the top still bearing the symbols of the faith.

“These have always been seen as a hindrance at the very top,” Dr Singh said.

“Some people have just found that it’s easier to get on in life without them. We had a Sikh chair of the Commission for Racial Equality and we have one or two in Parliament, but none has kept the symbols. Panesar is showing you can.”

In a few weeks Panesar has evolved from a promising player into a national phenomenon. On the eve of the Second Test against Pakistan at Old Trafford last month there was still doubt over his selection. Yet he emerged before an ever more enraptured crowd to take eight wickets, each sparking an ecstatic, leaping celebration.

Talk of cricket now echoes through the gudwaras, the Sikh temples. Religious leaders telephone his house in Luton offering traditional gifts. “They always ring up to say congratulations when Monty has played well,” his father, Paramjit Panesar, told The Times.

Two cut-outs of Mudhsuden Panesar, universally known as Monty, in full flight, are mounted above the television in the front room. Mr Panesar, a builder, flicks between sports channels and recalls the first time his son played. “He was only about 8 or 9,” he said. “I used to play for the Luton Tech College and would take him with me to watch. One day we were one player down and so we put him in. We told him just get hold of the ball, which he did pretty well.”

When the boy was 10, his parents gave him a cricket bat. He began to play for Luton Town and Indians Club, which was where he met Hitendra Naik, a coach who devoted every spare hour to nurturing the young boy’s aptitude for bowling.

He had long arms and hands that could span dinner plates. “When it was snowing in midwinter he’d get us out to play with his younger brother, Isher, even when it was so cold you couldn’t catch the ball,” Hemal Randerwala, his best friend, said.

At 16 Panesar was spotted by Nick Cook, a former England left-arm spinner and coach of Northamptonshire Second XI. “It was remarkable,” Cook told The Times. “His hands were like buckets and he had massive, massive fingers to wrap around the ball and give it an almighty rip. He had the sort of callus on the first knuckle of the middle finger you’d expect in a spinner 20 years older.”

Before his cricket career could take off, however, there was school — a fee-paying co-ed sixth-form college in Bedford and then a degree at Loughborough University, where Guy Jackson, the director of cricket, remembers a student who worked hard and practised cricket even harder.

“He said, ‘I want to be the best spin bowler in the world’, and he had those big eyes bulging and you knew he meant it,” David Capel, the first-team coach at Northamptonshire, said.

A common theme among the coaches who encountered Panesar was awe at his prodigious workrate: a player who could bowl 60 overs in a day and still be found in the nets first thing the next morning. Last year, in the shadow of England’s Ashes victory, practice began to make perfect, in eight brilliant matches for Northamptonshire that caught the eye of the England selectors.

There were still concerns about his batting and fielding. “As a fieldsman he is worse than Phil Tufnell,” Martin Love, a Northamptonshire team-mate, said — a comment regarded in cricket as a terrific insult.

Panesar contacted the selectors, promising to travel to a cricket academy in Australia to improve that part of his game.

At the end of January he was picked for the England squad for a tour of India and emerged into the limelight: 24 years old and the most famous Sikh in the West.

“He doesn’t like the idea of being famous,” his father said, recalling the sight of his son confronted by a fan outside his house. “He just wants to concentrate on his game.”

He sometimes returns to his old club, Luton Indians, on Sunday mornings and finds more and more Sikh children signed up to play.

Marketing executives regard him as hot property. Others have their eye on him as a role model for racial harmony.

“Because Sikhism stands between Islam and Hinduism, we often get asked to speak for the Asian community,” Dr Singh said. “Monty will find himself being asked to fill that role more and more, and I am sure he will do very well at it.”
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THE TURBANATOR

As a teenager, Monty Panesar had a poster of one of the world’s greatest batsmen, Sachin Tendulkar, on his bedroom wall. So in January, when he was picked for the England squad, he was thrilled that he would be playing India.

On March 3, in Naghpur, he faced his hero and dismissed him. “When it happened, I just felt like I was flying,” he wrote recently. “I didn’t know what to do with myself. I just thought, ‘This cannot be happening to me’. I was literally jumping with joy.

“I didn’t know how to respond — I wanted to dance, I had so much energy; I wanted to run around to all my team-mates. I had no idea how to react, so I just ran and jumped and went crazy. I do it all the time now when I take a wicket.”

And so an England star emerged. Panesar went on to bowl Mohammed Kaif, and, in the second innings, the Indian captain Rahul Dravid. Of his 25 test wickets to date, 20 were big-time batsmen — players who had all scored test centuries. In the current series against Pakistan,

he has three times out-foxed their batting linchpin, Mohammed Yousuf, whose average tops 50.

There is a postscript to his meeting with his hero.

After the match, when he had calmed down, Panesar plucked up the courage to enter the Indian team’s dressing rooms carrying the ball. Tendulkar signed it for him.
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