Sikh and spin
FRANK KEATING Monty Panesar returns to Lord's next week. The young Sikh continues to be a revelation. In his last Lord's Test match in May, Panesar's six-wicket bag made him the first English spin bowler to take five or more in an innings at 'HQ' since Derek Underwood all of 33 summers ago. 'Deadly' Derek was also a left-armer, but one with brisker intent and a more businesslike bearing. Panesar sets traps with softer, subtler curves and more of a classicist's loop. After only 17 Test matches he has taken 65 wickets, which almost matches the start of one-time prodigy Underwood — easily England's most prolific spin bowler with 297 Test wickets — who took 71 in his first 17 Tests. Panesar's remarkable entrance easily outshines the trio of England's luminous lefties of my time: after 17 Tests, Tony Lock had 56 wickets, Johnny Wardle 55, and Phil Edmonds 49. Panesar's apprenticeship stands up well, too, to that of England's all-time southpaw spinmeisters: Hedley Verity and Wilfred Rhodes had logged, respectively, 70 and 77 wickets after their first 17 matches; and in his only 15 Tests 'Farmer' White managed just 49. For good measure, compared to Panesar's 65, England's finest ever (right-arm) off-spinner, Jim Laker, racked up 'only' 58 in his first 17.
Is it something in the air around Northampton's matey County Ground? More than three decades ago, Panesar's home paddock was also stage and sanctum for another bearded, patka-wearing Sikh, Bishen Singh Bedi, probably the most serenely beguiling of all history's left-arm spinners (266 Test wickets for India, 1966-79). In rewind's reverie, honestly, ol' Bish himself could claim, 'I was Monty's double'; well, half-close your eyes at Lord's next week and in evocative outline it could be the onliest Bedi down there, wheeling sublimely away in the sunshine: two peas in the pod, twin pearls in a shell.
Historically, us Brits had been led to believe that all Sikh cricketers were strong-armed, strong-willed, whirling warriors of the crease. I vividly recall, for instance, lusty Navjot Sidhu, bristling beard and kestrel's eye, savaging the fiercest of centuries from Graham Gooch's England at Madras 15 years ago Again, remember strapping Balwinder Sandhu, deceptively quick, setting in train India's day of days at Lord's in the 1983 World Cup final by at once clean bowling Gordon Greenidge for next to nothing? As a boy, of course, I read of how, in India's first ever Test match at Lord's 75 years ago this very summer, bounding, hairy-armed Amar Singh swept away Sutcliffe, Ames and Hammond at a lick, after which the last named, England's champion Wally, ruefully pronounced: 'He came off the pitch like the crack of doom'.
Sikhs were feared and famed wrestlers; and, as well, hockey players: phenomenally, India XIs, packed with fabled Sikhs, were Olympic hockey champions seven times out of eight between the Games of 1928 and 1964. Endurance, too, and speed: oldest ever finisher of the London marathon, in 2004, remains retired Punjab mango-farmer Fauja Singh, aged 93; first Sikh sportsman I ever saw was Milkha Singh — `the Barefoot Turbanned Tempest' (Daily Express) — who awesomely spreadeagled the 440-yard field at the 1958 Empire Games in Cardiff. Milkha's son, Jeev, 35, is now a leading US tour golfer and could be teeing off in the Open at Carnoustie on Thursday just as Monty Panesar is marking out his run-up at Lord's. Surely worth a big weekend bet for a smasheroo Sikh double?
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