A video of the performance on Celebrity Mastermind went viral on Twitter on the day it was broadcast in January 2019, receiving 1.5m views and almost 25,000 likes. Highlights included the 38-year-old responding with Athens when asked to name the city in which Germany’s national football team play their home fixtures and thinking Oliver Twist was the season of the year poet John Keats described as ‘a one of mists and mellow fruitfulness’. (The correct answers are Munich and autumn for those interested).

Absolutely incredible performance from Monty Panesar on Mastermind. pic.twitter.com/2N3nfNFk60

— Andy Ha (@AndyHa_) January 11, 2019

Panesar had performed well answering questions on his specialist subject, Sikhism and its history, and having scored six points in his opening round, went into the second with hopes of emerging victorious from the famous British quiz show. Instead, the left-arm spinner answered just one of his 15 general knowledge questions correctly.

“I thought I was doing pretty well, get another five or six in the next round and I could win this,” said Panesar who took 167 Test wickets across 85 innings for England. “General knowledge came, the Mastermind seat got me, I had stage fright. I had my Mastermind meltdown. It was worse than facing a Mitchell Johnson bouncer!”

Though Panesar played Tests in front of 100,000 at the MCG, withstanding sledges from some of the most fearsome cricketers to have played the game, he was no match for what was, in his view, some expert mental disintegration from host John Humphrys. “I think it was John Humphrys,” he said. “He didn’t know what cricket was or something like that. It makes you feel comfortable when someone says ‘I know who you are’, because then it’s like ‘OK, I can relax a little bit.’ I think he purposefully said it to intimidate me, and it worked. He was probably laughing away inside thinking ‘this guy is completely thick’. I watched it back and I thought ‘This Monty Panesar is really thick’.

“He’s like, you know Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons? He reminds me of someone like that, sitting there thinking ‘I’ve got this guy. I’ve got one who’s having a meltdown and I’m going to go after him’. He’s obviously a legend broadcaster, he’s got a real presence. I don’t think we did [speak afterwards] and I didn’t really want to either.”

Panesar went to extreme lengths to stop those close to him from finding out about the performance, but was powerless to stop it trending on Twitter. In the end, even he saw the funny side.

“I was well annoyed,” he said. “I was like ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to be so embarrassing on national TV.’ I thought ‘How the hell did I get a degree and a Postgraduate as well? How did I even get into Loughborough?’

[breakout id=”0″][/breakout] “On the day [it was broadcast] I purposefully took all my friends out to dinner. I was like ‘Guys, we’re going out tonight’. They were like, ‘Why all of a sudden?’ I was like ‘I fancy having a dinner with you guys, I haven’t seen you for ages’. I knew Mastermind was on, so I thought I’d have a little peak [at Twitter]. Trending topic: Monty Panesar. The top topic. They go ‘Monty, are you OK?’ I was like, ‘I’m OK, let’s order dessert and have more coffee, let’s stay here a little bit later!’ I got home about 10, 11 o’clock at night, I thought ‘Let me have another look at the trending topics, I must have gone down’. Still number one. No.2 is Oliver Twist. I switched my phone off and I threw it and went to sleep. I got up the next morning and watched the episode. Even I laughed at it, I can see why everyone’s taking the piss, it was so funny.”