Death by Numbers

An interview from The Independent which goes over some familiar themes with a familiar player - and a decent man - whose responses are much more balanced than the headline.

One of the things Ramprakash seems to confirm is the fact that his career is going to continue well past the age of forty, largely because he's never achieved the degree of professional fulfilment which most of his contemporaries did. Which means that interviews like this will continue to be published year on year, and most of the questions they raise will remain unanswerable forever.

All you can say is that this was, by modern English standards, an extraordinarily good player, but one who could never quite prove just how good he was.

Games involving precise numerical measurement of individual performance can be cruel. And cricket is the cruellest of the lot.