Monty Panesar, it seems, is moving counties in an effort to revive a career that now flags as much as it once flew.

His problems are not restricted to his slow left-arm bowling having so thoroughly lost its way. The loss of his England contract – an inevitability after the year he has just had - has thrust the onus for paying his salary upon whichever county employs him, and Northamptonshire, the club that nurtured him, found themselves unsure as to whether they could afford to keep him in the financial style to which he is accustomed.

Forcing players of reputation to switch counties was not what England contracts were designed to do, but in Panesar’s case this is not generally deemed to be a bad thing.

There is a commonly held theory that for someone in the position he is in now, a change of scene may be just what he needs. Fresh challenges and a different environment might just drag him out of the mental rut into which he appears so horribly stuck.

He has already lent support to that idea by going off to spend the winter playing for Highveld Lions in South Africa, the best displacement activity he can find in view of the fact that England do not want him.

The argument is that as long as Panesar keeps playing, he will eventually get back to bowling well.

And it’s true that everyone knows Panesar can bowl. We have seen him do it, beautifully, on many occasions during his short but often brilliant Test career. There are not many bowlers in the game, certainly not England spinners, who have taken 120 wickets in their first 36 months of Test cricket and in the process unpicked the techniques of numerous world-class batsmen. It was obvious that here was somebody in love with his art.

He probably loves it a lot less now after 12 months of sliding from one indignity to another - in India and West Indies, where he was usurped as England’s No 1 spinner by the super-confidently cocksure Graeme Swann, and then back home in the first Ashes Test at Cardiff.

When Panesar’s batting is all that anyone can remember him contributing to a game, you know things have got bad.

But will a mere change of scene be enough? Much surely depends on whether Sussex’s batsmen can put runs on the board, whether Michael Yardy proves a sympathetic captain and how the pitches play at Hove.

And, in any case, do Monty’s problems go beyond a mere temporary loss of form? There is certainly a worrying dimension to his predicament because it is hard to think of an England cricketer who rose so steeply, or declined so precipitously. He couldn’t even take wickets for Northants last summer.

It has become fashionable to switch counties in the hope that it will bring about a change of fortune but it is hard to find a precedent that might comfort Panesar. Kevin Pietersen left Nottinghamshire for Hampshire, and duly won himself a Test place, but he more or less had to leave because he had fallen out with so many team-mates that it was going to be hard to stay.