Monty Panesar hires professionals to help him find way back into cricket

The spinner has roped in a performance coach, a hypnotherapist, a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist in a bid to help himself find a way back into cricket.

New Delhi: Finally Monty Panesar is ready to help himself. The troubled English spinner has reportedly hired a team of professionals to help him overcome mental illness and find a place back in the national team.

According to a report in The Times, the 33-year-old spinner has roped in a performance coach, a hypnotherapist, a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist in a bid to help himself find a way back into cricket.

"For a long time I was in denial that I had a problem," Panesar told The Times. "It was in my first session with the hypnotherapist that I began to realise that something was wrong and that I needed help."

After an unceremonious divorce from his wife, Panesar hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons, including for urinating on a bouncer at a nightclub in Brighton in 2013. Besides, his grip on the professional front as a cricketer took a nosedive.

"The best way to describe it is that I have suffered from feelings of paranoia, and that these feelings were linked to my performances on the field. The worse things went, the lower my confidence went, the more paranoid I became. Things spiralled downhill so that I began to think my team-mates were all against me," the report added.

Having played 50 Tests and taken 167 wickets, Panesar was once considered a solution to England's spin woes. But an erractic behaviour only proved detrimental to his career and was soon found out of the reckoning.

But with a new found purpose, he is ready to help himself.

"One part of me thought, I should be the one out there bowling 30 or 40 overs a day going for two an over," he said. "But then another part of me was saying, 'Come on, Monty, you've not helped yourself.'