Reuters
 
Luton, England, Aug 11: England's new spin-bowling hero Monty Panesar returned to his roots on Thursday and took a wicket with his first delivery.

The 24-year-old left-arm spinner was back in his hometown of Luton, 40 kilometres outside London, where he enjoyed a game with a group of young British Asians on a patch of grass in a housing estate better known for race riots than cricket.

The wickets were painted trash bins, the ball was a tennis ball with tape and the bats were bright red and made from plastic, courtesy of the visiting Urban Cricket Roadshow.

The tall, bearded Panesar, dressed in jeans and trainers, grinned back with the same pleasure he has shown in test matches against Younis Khan, the batsman he removed at Headingley this week with "the best ball I've bowled in test cricket."

"I always dreamt that I would one day play for England," Panesar, the first Sikh to play for England, told reporters. "But I never thought about popularity, or fame. I just didn't imagine it at all. I guess it is just destiny that it is going to be like this."

Panesar, who produced two successive match-winning performances against Pakistan in recent weeks, knows all about life in a tough place like the Marsh Farm estate.

He was brought up by his immigrant Indian father Paramjit, a local builder who specialises in fitting kitchens, in Wardown, a sprawl of suburbia rescued from anonymity by the quality of its cricket ground.

Panesar may follow a line of great names - including Derek Underwood and Phil Edmonds - as a classic spinner. But he is unique: a turban-wearing crowd-pleaser, who has worked to improve his fumbling fielding, a modest, almost bashful, man with whom all English cricket fans, but especially the Asian community, can identify.