End of an Era

This, from Alan White's often superb blog The Crap Cricketer, is a find which, for me, turned the clock back nineteen years in an instant.

For anyone who doesn't remember it, the game took place in September 1993, at the conclusion of what was briefly called the 'AXA Equity and Law League'. It was the old John Player League by yet another of its many names, but for the first time matches were played over fifty overs per side rather than forty, and, for the first time in English cricket, players wore coloured clothing.

Memories of the way things used to be were strong, and the changes were largely unpopular, but the competition did throw up a winner-take-all final match between the league's top two sides, Kent and Glamorgan, at Canterbury, which also happened to be the last game of major professional cricket that Viv Richards would ever play.

Glamorgan ended up winning comfortably, but what really stuck in the mind was the bowling of a young Australian called Duncan Spencer, of whom nobody had previously heard but who bowled like the wind. As Alan says, the sight of the ageing Richards fending off Spencer's thunderbolts carries a sense of the passing of an era, with the old master trying desperately hard to show that he wasn't intimidated, or even surprised (as everyone else was), by what was coming down at him. He largely succeeded, and went on to finish on 46 not out, never to be seen again in a match that really mattered.

At the time the game created waves. For one thing Glamorgan had won a trophy, for another Richards had retired, and for another Kent seemed to have found one of the fastest bowlers in the world from nowhere.

And if you're wondering what the players thought, have a look both at some of Steve Marsh's takes and the expression on Carl Hooper's face after an early one whistles past Adrian Dale's bat. These were people who'd seen a bit, and they knew they were watching something remarkable.

Aspects of the film are massively evocative. The standing ovation given to the helmetless Richards for one, and also the sheer size of the St.Lawrence Ground crowd (12,000, some of whom had started queuing at 4 a.m. according to Wisden). Forget Twenty20, which can still pack them in like that in places such as Taunton and Chelmsford, this, in a small, fading way, was what domestic limited-over cricket in England was like in its greatest era. But an era which, in truth, had ended years before.

Earlier that season I saw Richards make a double-hundred in defeat at Cardiff against Middlesex. One lunch interval, in the old Sophia Gardens clubhouse, I glimpsed him sitting opposite Mark Ramprakash. They chatted as Richards finished his ice cream and it was easy to suppose that Richards was passing on the advice of a cricketing lifetime. That's how things were with Richards then. His career was ending and everyone was taking what they could from him in the certain knowledge that his like would never be seen again.

In many ways that day at Canterbury was also the end of an era for both players. Duncan Spencer's career faded away amid injuries and a failed drug test. In late 2006 I saw him bowling for Buckinghamshire against Devon. His hair had gone, and so had most of his pace.

When I saw his name on the scorecard I instantly thought of Canterbury.

In his quiet moments I suspect he still does too.

Prophet without Honour

When a batsman retires after twenty-five years in professional cricket and you can clearly remember where you were when he played his first match, well, you're getting old. In fact, both of you are.

So it is with me and Mark Ramprakash.


These days Toby Radford coaches the West Indies. But when I first saw him he was batting with Mark Ramprakash.

Radford was young then, about seventeen, younger even than Ramprakash, and he was resolutely and quietly orthodox in the slightly uneasy way which young players who've been brought up by cricket coach fathers are. I remember him only as a counterpoint to the main act, which involved Ramprakash repeatedly advancing down the wicket to Hampshire Seconds' Paul-Jan Bakker and attempting to hit him into the next parish. For the most part he failed and was soon cleaned up by a man, Alan Mullally, with whom he later played for England.

Everyone knew he'd be good, though, and when, a couple of months later, he took his side to the NatWest Trophy with a display of mature coolness and skill, the world seemed to be at his feet. It was just a matter of time.

But his time never came.

Maybe it's just me, but the images which scroll into my mind when I think of Ramprakash tend to be of struggle and failure: the teeth-gritted battles against the West Indies in 1991 which promised so much, the Lord's pair against the same opponents in 1995 and the fish-out-of-water failures when opening in 2000. However, if you think a little harder you can see him, arms aloft on a sunny day at the Kensington Oval, with his maiden Test hundred in the bag. As usual, everyone thought he'd cracked Test cricket then, but he never did.

The obvious, brutal, truth about cricket is that statistics, when compiled over an extended period, don't lie. And if you end up with an average of 27 from 52 Tests it means, for whatever range of reasons, that, at the highest level of the game, you weren't really very good.

For most people who fail in Test cricket there's little anxiety or discussion outside their own heads. They didn't quite have it; they came, they went. Rarely do they get more than fifty matches to show themselves. Ramprakash was different, though, which was why he got all those games and why so many people - especially those who follow the two counties he graced, really graced, for a quarter-century - have always found what happened to him at the highest level so confusing and difficult to understand.

I've discussed Ramprakash and his legacy here before, and I don't have any definitive answers. But as someone who first heard about his potential in 1983, followed his first-class career from its very first day to its last, and first wrote about him in 1992, my instinct is that he was someone whose consuming desire to succeed outweighed his ability to deal with the prospect of the sense of inadequacy which was bound to follow a failure to do so, especially once, early in his Test career, the big scores failed to come. He simply wanted it too much.

And, God knows, some of the attacks he faced in his early days - the West Indians in 1991, Wasim and Waqar in 1992 - had their merits too.

The suspicion lingers that under his edgy, passionate exterior, Ramprakash was always much more vulnerable than he seemed. And the landscape surrounding the England side which he came into at the turn of the nineties could not have been more different to the air of security, mutual support, belief and trust which surrounds it today.

When they're reassured, and encouraged, and given time to develop, fragile yet gifted players can thrive and be recognized for what they are. Just look at Ian Bell.

For the years which followed his leaving of Test cricket in 2002, Ramprakash was destined for life as the greatest prophet without honour the modern game has seen. His batting for Surrey during his real glory years between 2002 and 2010 was, regardless of bowling or conditions, among the very finest seen from an English batsman since the Second World War. It was his way of absolving the memory of the other, less glorious, chapters which had gone before.

People will tell you things about Mark Ramprakash.

But don't ever let anyone tell you that Mark Ramprakash wasn't very good.

There Was a Time

There was a time, years ago, when Mark Ramprakash wasn't the cause célèbre he later became. The man who embodies both all that is good and pure and true in batting technique, but at the same time the player who, more than any other modern Englishman, represents a certain type of failure. The man who simply couldn't cope with the pressure of performing at the highest level of the game, of living up to everybody's expectations, including his own.

There was a time - such as when I first glimpsed him, scything away at Paul-Jan Bakker on a London club ground in the late eighties - when Ramprakash just used to go out and bat. His technique wasn't the thing of beauty it subsequently became, but it didn't need to be. All he needed was his eye, his footwork, his bravery and his bat. He was relatively unsophisticated, but he was also endlessly aggressive and very good.

I say this because Virat Kohli reminds me strongly of the Ramprakash that once was. Like the young Ramprakash he has a brilliant eye, an orthodox yet uncomplicated technique which works, and he approaches bowlers as though they exist only to serve up balls for him to hit to the boundary. While the statistics which accompany his embryonic Test career are anaemic, his one-day career is taking vivid shape as part of an Indian team which is attempting to create an identity which distinguishes it both from the old guard who are going or gone, and from an England tour which should have shocked it to its foundations. At the moment it is succeeding and there is little chance of mistaking England for a team which knows how to stem the flow.

Just a few short weeks ago England were humiliating India. Now, with home advantage reversed, everything is very different. At a steaming Wankhede Stadium tomorrow, a transformed Indian side will be confident of extending their series lead to 4-0.

Kohli will be more confident than most, because this, you feel, is how he is. It remains to be seen whether he can succeed where Ramprakash failed in the long game, but he will surely have further opportunities.

Rahane is deeply impressive, and the hunch is that more will be seen of Pujara before too long. Kohli, though, with equally outstanding centuries against England at venues as diverse as Cardiff and Delhi over the last five weeks, is India's real diamond.

There was a time when Ramprakash seemed to have the world at his feet. He never quite did.

Kohli really does.

Few Tears Shed

There was a time when Surrey were the team which set the standards in county cricket. Not just in the 1950s, when they were the most potent team the championship has ever seen, but, more recently, in the era of Stewart, Thorpe, Butcher, Lewis, the Bicknells, the Hollioakes and Saqlain Mushtaq, when they won plenty of games but few friends.

Now, though, things are different. As a general rule, if Derbyshire thrash you at home, you are really struggling.

This, though, is the reality of life for Surrey as the 2010 season begins - some decent signings, the greatest English batsman since who knows when, but a 22 year-old greenhorn as skipper and a team that looks very far from being the sum of its parts. With Ramprakash failing to score in the second innings and Derbyshire's brilliant Australian accumulator Chris Rogers piling up the runs at the other end, Surrey's hopes of a successful start to the season rapidly disappeared into the deep blue ether over The Oval.

Chris Adams will ponder and fulminate, and, in all probability, they'll start to get it right before the season's over.

But, outside their own membership, few tears will be shed.

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.

Encounters with the Stars

The Old Batsman writes about seeing Shane Watson, Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey in the street in London.

I can't remember seeing any properly famous cricketers in the street. I don't think Keith Tomlins (of Middlesex and Gloucestershire non-fame) and Kevin Jarvis (the man who once said that if he could bowl at himself it would be 'an amputation job to get the ball out of my hand') really count, although I hope someone out there remembers them.

However, I did once share a Port Elizabeth hotel with the England team and its media pack.

At one point I was walking, alone, down a corridor, and, coming in the other direction, also alone, was Ian Botham. He looked at me, I looked at him. He looked suspicious, I probably just looked sunburnt after a day spent frying in the St.George's Park sunshine. Neither of us said anything, although I had the distinct impression that he expected me to, probably because he was all too used to people thinking they knew him when they didn't and treating him like a lost friend when he hadn't got a clue who they were. I reflected later on our wordless encounter, thinking about the fact that while he'd never consciously seen me before and knew nothing about me, I knew his name, when and where he was born, the names of his wife and children, where he grew up, went to school, and so on and so on. To all intents and purposes I did know him. But then again I didn't.

Another member of my party opened the door of his hotel room to find Bob Willis bowling a tennis ball down the corridor at Mark Ramprakash.

I think he played and missed.

How it Happens

This is how it happens. Enough people suggest him, Geoff Miller says that 'nobody is ruled out' (not even Darren Pattinson?), the press stick their oar in and suddenly there seems to be an irresistible clamour for Mark Ramprakash to be recalled to the England team.

I go back a very long way with Mark Ramprakash. I'm a little older than him and I also grew up in Middlesex. I first heard about him on the cricket grapevine when he was thirteen. I saw him play regularly during his early years at Middlesex, was cheering him on from the Tavern Stand when he piloted his county to a Nat West Trophy victory in 1988, watched him move on to and through the years of unfulfilment in Test cricket.

Technically he's the best English batsman I've ever seen.

There are things you can't change, though. One is that he's now nearly forty years old; another is that his record in Test cricket is, for a player of his ability, utterly mediocre, although he did play most of his Tests before the era of central contracts (which would have helped him a lot) and against some very good attacks (West Indies 1991, Pakistan 1992, South Africa 1995-6).

Many feel that his achievements over recent seasons in the Surrey side suggest that he's a better player than he was. I'm not totally convinced about that. He always was incredibly good, but it's only in recent seasons, as people have forgotten what his Test career was like, that he's become a cause celebre, with the result that people seem to think that what he's done over recent years at a much lower level of cricket is more important than what he did at a higher level when he was younger and fitter.

If he was recalled the pressure on him would be searingly intense. All the past evidence suggests that he would find it very difficult to cope. Even in these straitened times, with the lack of alternatives positively scary, I don't think I'd pick him. But nobody's going to ask me to.

What will the selectors do?

If changes are to be made - and Bopara has to be gone - fairness and logic suggest that Jonathan Trott should come in, but fairness and logic have never played much part in English selection decisions, and it may be that Robert Key, to whom batting at three shouldn't hold any fears, is a more likely pick.

I'm going to stick my neck out and predict that they won't select Ramprakash, mainly because they'll be too worried about what they'll have to say and do if he succeeds.

Playing On

A nice piece from The Guardian by the long-time Graeme Hick obsessive (hope you don't mind me terming it like that, Simon, it's meant in the nicest possible way) Simon Hattenstone.

And it's out of date already - Hick made his 136th century this afternoon.

Meaning Too Much

It seems obligatory this morning to write something about Mark Ramprakash, who yesterday became the 25th - and almost certainly the last - player to make 100 first-class centuries.

I can't write anything original about the man as it's all been said before, but I'll content myself with saying that when it comes to technical fundamentals, he was the very best English player of his generation, but you need a bit more than an impregnable technique to succeed at the very highest level.

His main problem always seemed to be that it just meant too much.

The Best of the Best

After my first day's cricket of the 2008 season at Taunton yesterday, I've been lying low at home today and watching a stirring conclusion to the 'regular' Guinness Premiership season.

However, I always keep an eye on Cricinfo's 'The Surfer', and today it carried a link to this piece in the Daily Telegraph by Simon Hughes.

Even though I belong to the apparently small group of people who feel that it would have been a retrograde step to bring Ramprakash back into the England side in the last few seasons, Hughes's excellent article has many resonances for me. In 1988 I was a Middlesex supporter and was at Lord's for Ramprakash's heroics in the NatWest Final. Indeed I still have a scorecard which he signed for me at a reception afterwards in the Lord's Banqueting Suite.

Those of us who knew what he could do then were among the most disappointed by what came afterwards, but we'll surely be among those who raise a glass highest when the inevitable hundredth hundred comes.

Because, like another undervalued artist who I was watching today (but who may yet get the chance to display his wares on the international stage), James Simpson-Daniel, Ramprakash truly was better than any of his contemporaries.

Normal Service

Another day, another English cricket season, another quietly dismantled county bowling attack, another Mark Ramprakash century.

Although I fall into the camp of people who don't happen to think it would be a good idea to recall him to the England team - although I could be open to persuasion - I'm increasingly starting to wonder when, since the retirement of the Don in the late 1940s, has anyone made so many runs so consistently, over such a long period and with such inevitability?

I've got some time off work next week so I might do some digging around in the mass of cricket books that stuff my home and see whether I can come up with an answer.

However, by then, he'll probably have made some more runs and the IPL will have started, so we'll see...

Time to Move On

It's that time of the English autumn when there's nothing much going on in this country (apart from the announcement of the odd touring side) and little enough elsewhere in the cricket world (apart from what seem like endless ODIs on the sub-continent). This being the case, the past week seemed like a good time to let things slide a bit on the blog and see what else life has to offer; last weekend I took myself off to Derby to visit my parents and managed to get out into the Derbyshire Dales, where the weather was gorgeous and the scenery equally beautiful.

A few things got through, though, including the fact that Andrew Strauss had been left out of the England Test team to tour Sri Lanka, but Mark Ramprakash hadn't, as was widely predicted, been recalled.

Strauss had appeared to be living on borrowed time for a bit too long. In fact he's never appeared quite the same since his old mate Marcus left the stage. A batsman trying to operate outside his comfort zone and play too many shots, but also a player ground down by the way in which the world's best bowlers had homed in on and exposed his weaknesses. In the age of trial by DVD it's like that, and, when the England selectors are looking for a way to get a couple of extra batsmen into the team, you're going to be in trouble if you've got no major runs behind you for more than a year.

As an admirer of both Shah and Bopara I'm happy with the decision; Strauss, even at 30, is easily young enough and good enough to come again.

Nobody admires Ramprakash more than me but a recall at 38 for someone with a proven record of total mediocrity in Test cricket? No thanks. He's better now than he ever was, they say. Well, maybe. But he was pretty damn good as a Middlesex player in 1995 and he couldn't score a run for England then, so why should it be any different now? No, Shah or Bopara could score just as many runs in Sri Lanka as Ramprakash might, and it will be far more significant for England's future if they do.

Ramprakash is perhaps the greatest 'might have been' in post-war English cricket, but, sadly, that's where he's destined to stay. Time to move on.

Another One to Watch

As a former member of Middlesex and a member of Somerset since 1996, I've been keeping a close eye on events at Lord's over the past few days. At the moment it looks as though Somerset are on top in the Friends Provident Trophy game today, but Middlesex won the championship match with some comfort after reducing Somerset to 50 for 8 on the first morning after which Justin Langer declared.

However, I was especially pleased to see that the young Somerset batsman James Hildreth had made a century. It doesn't seem three years since he burst onto the Taunton scene with a composed maiden century against Durham, and he hasn't managed to kick on with any consistency since.

He is, though, a compact, talented and stylish player, who's often reminded me of the young Mark Ramprakash.

It's early days but there have been some good signs for Somerset so far this season; if James can finally go on and produce a haul of runs to match his ability it will be a sweet return indeed.

If It Ain't Broke, The ECB Will Fix It

Although the weather in this part of the UK is still comparatively mild (almost warm, in fact) the English cricket season has long since disappeared into the darker recesses of the memory. I'm not fortunate enough to be personally acquainted with any professional cricketers, but I would imagine that most of them (with the obvious exception of Mark Ramprakash, who's dancing on television) are on holiday and some of them (Ian Blackwell) are on honeymoon.

It all seems quite a long time ago now, but, if you really try to remember, you can recall that Sussex won the County Championship and the re-vamped (aka ruined) Cheltenham and Gloucester Trophy, Essex won the First Division of the Pro 40 League, and Leicestershire won the Twenty20 Cup. The two first-class counties I follow most closely, Middlesex and Somerset, finished bottom of most of the competitions they entered, although my Minor County, Devon, did very well.

My lasting impression, though, is of what an unholy mess the county season's become. Okay, it wasn't much cop beforehand, but what really gave the ECB the peculiar idea that changing the C and G from a knockout competition into a group-based one where most sides lost interest after the first couple of games would be of benefit to English cricket? Not to mention getting rid of the Minor Counties, who rarely won and usually lost heavily, but whose participation in the competition had given people in many parts of the country their only opportunity to watch first-class cricketers in live action.

And then we had the re-launched Pro 40 League, which simply involved lopping five overs off the old Totesport League and pretending that a 40 over league was a radical new departure for cricket in this country. Well, maybe all the people who run the ECB are younger than me (the visual evidence suggests otherwise although I doubt the same is true of its marketing department) and don't remember the halcyon days of the John Player League, but it had obviously escaped their notice that the first league of that type actually began in 1969.

So, less a radical departure and more an example of re-embracing an old idea because you feel like altering things and can't think of anything original to do.

Anyway, that's all over and it's time to get on with the winter's cricket which certainly won't be devoid of meaning.

Oh dear, what's that? The ICC Champions Trophy has just started?

If it ain't broke...

Beware Ramps

Over Easter I was chatting with a couple of members of my family about the prospects for the County Championship Division Two season (my Dad follows Derbyshire, you see). We didn't come to many firm conclusions but I do remember suggesting that Surrey would win it and 'Ramprakash will make millions of runs'.

That was obviously an exaggeration, but I knew that Mark Ramprakash would lay waste to the division's bowlers. And he has. The latest instalment was a career-best 301 not out against Northants at The Oval, an innings which, to me, had a remarkable inevitability about it. He was dismissed on 292 against Gloucestershire early in the season, but I was virtually certain, after he ended the first day on 174, that he'd make 300 this time.

It must be difficult at times, being Mark Ramprakash. To know that for much of the nineties you were one of the best batsmen in the whole world, but that you never managed to prove yourself properly at the highest level of the game, so you've been left to pile up runs against bowlers barely fit to lace your boots. But the runs still have to be made, and, whenever you hear him interviewed, he seems to have reconciled himself with the vicissitudes of his past.

And he's not alone, either in terms of past experiences or the quality of his batting. Down in Southampton John Crawley also continues to pile up runs like there's no tomorrow.

It must be difficult at times, being a county bowler.