Former England spinner Monty Panesar has hit back at Steven Smith after the stand-in Australia skipper trolled him over his ‘pretty comical’ performance on the ‘Mastermind’ quiz show six years ago. Panser said that his mistakes were a lack of general knowledge, which is ‘better than being a cheat’.
Panesar began the spat when, in a recent interview with a gambling platform, he urged the England team traveling for the 2025-26 Ashes to sledge and make Smith feel ‘guilty’ about Sandpapergate. Smith seemingly came prepared for that question in his press conference on the eve of the first Test in Perth, and unfurled a two-minute monologue, listing several of Panesar’s errors in the quiz show.
“I’ve started, so I’ll finish,” Panesar wrote for The Telegraph.
“Those were the words I heard at the end of my Mastermind shocker six years ago. But if I’m guilty of anything, it is having bad general knowledge. And that is better than being a cheat.”
“… I watched the Australia cricket captain launch his hilarious press conference performance from the comfort of my sofa. And what a performance it was. I simply cannot believe that the Australian captain on the eve of the Ashes brought up my Celebrity Mastermind performance from 2019. Yes, I know I had an absolute shocker that day. I got six questions right on my specialist subject, Sikhism and its history, then got only one question correct in the general knowledge round. It was terrible, I know it was bad.”
“However, at least I can hold my hands up and admit that. It’s bad knowledge, but at least it isn’t ball-tampering. I would actually ask Steve whether he can look himself in the mirror yet and admit that he was part of “sandpapergate”, the worst example of Australian cheating in history.”
Panesar said Smith had revealed a ‘massive weakness and mental vulnerability,’ something elite players cannot afford. He accepted that both men had made mistakes, but pointed out that his were on a TV quiz show, while Smith’s came on a cricket field — and only one of them seemed willing to accept it.
He added that Smith should simply have owned up when asked about Sandpapergate instead of deflecting to Mastermind, calling the tactic ‘foolish’.
“Some people have suggested what he did was bullying, but I don’t believe that. He’s tried to deflect the attention on to me and I get that. But what I do question is whether he should be Australia captain given what he has done? That for me raises serious questions about Australia’s leadership and a lack of it across the squad. If it was an England player who had been found guilty of blatant ball-tampering like Smith’s team were, I don’t think they would be captaining this team going into this series. I think that would be very tricky given how 2018 played out,” Panesar said.
The former spinner concluded by saying that Smith had made ‘a massive blunder,’ and he was eager to see how it played out, hoping the fallout might disrupt Australia and tilt the series in England’s favour.
Although it’s not atypical of former cricketers to try and get under the skin of the current ones and for the latter to respond publicly, this incident is being described in both countries as pretty ‘bizarre’.
What did Steve Smith say?
Smith, with his comments, seemed to suggest that he wasn’t ‘bothered’ about the comments from someone who’d make such simple mistakes.
“I’m gonna go off topic for a second here,” Smith said. “Who have you in the room have seen Mastermind and Monty Panesar on that? Any of you? Yeah, well, those of you that have, you’ll understand where I’m coming from, and those of you haven’t, do yourself a favour because it’s pretty comical. Anyone that believes that Athens is in Germany, that’s a start; Oliver Twist is a season of the year and America is a city, [it] doesn’t really bother me, those comments. That’s as far as I’ll go with that one,” he added.
The Ashes begin on Friday with the first Test at the Optus Stadium, starting at 9:30 am IST.
