Thursday, 23rd August 2007 at 2:50 pm

Monty Panesar? No, Monty Rhodes…

It was going to happen eventually, but the suggestion was that it would be employed with a healthy dose of irony. Instead, the first coining of England’s Monty Panesar - the latest in a long line of slow left-armers who can’t field, Phil Tuffnell, Paul Harris and Dave Mohammed amongst them - has arrived in an admiring context, after the turbaned cricketer dived, retrieved and returned in enough time to run out Saurav Ganguly in Tuesday’s first one-day international.

Granted, Ganguly is second only to Inzamam-ul-Haq as the worst runner between wickets in history, but for a man who not long ago was comfortably the worst fielder in world cricket (another category Ganguly ranks very highly in), Panesar’s fielding brilliance was breathtaking, and prompted Ian Botham to label him ‘Monty Rhodes’. He’s gone from incompetent to reasonably useful in mere months; at this rate, it won’t be long before we’re referring to our own fielding genius as ‘Jonty Panesar’.