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.