Meet the new boss, not quite the same as the old boss

There is an underbelly to the county championship. For all of its romantic evocations of the turning of England's seasons, it has been a place where men's dreams have died, where their image of themselves has been reshaped, where thwarted ambition has blackened. It has its dark side.

In that regard it always has its symbols, its totems, too. For a decade, it was Barry Richards at Hampshire, a man whose talent engaged in a long and sometimes futile battle with his ennui. There was the brooding, brutal presence of Sylvester Clarke at the Oval, a putative king in exile. Mike Proctor at Gloucester wheeled in endlessly in lieu of having anyplace else to do it. There were others too, and all were players who found it a place of last resort.

For Graeme Hick and Mark Ramprakash it was something different, a way of slaking a thirst perhaps. For seasons now, Ramprakash has been its premier player. It has probably been a long time since May has come and gone without a hundred from him in the books, but he is over 40 now and what could once be summoned at will doesn't arrive so easily now. It could be his final year.

So who will succeed him? The answer is simple: it can only be Marcus Trescothick. The vagaries of the modern calendar have denied him a thousand runs by the end of May. He has piled up 978 already. His exile to county cricket is of a different sort, and he'll be a different kind of king. There is still a sense of what might have been about him, but he wears it more lightly. The competition needs someone like him at the top as its symbol of excellence. While he's there, as with Ramps, it's in safe hands.

Ramps: More Die Of Heartbreak

There's a nice piece with Mark Ramprakash in the new All Out Cricket. It's a simple idea: he was asked for 10 definitive moments from his career, and the results are short but sweet, or rather bittersweet, as things with Ramps usually are.

His final choice is his hundredth hundred, in 2008 against Yorkshire. 'There was a Test match on at the time and we were batting out a draw, so it was pretty low-key,' he says. 'Having said that, I was captain, Goughie was captain of Yorkshire and my parents came to watch, which was nice in terms of emotion. I'm in no way complacent about the achievement; I'm chuffed to bits and incredibly grateful to have had a long career but I know that only two of those hundreds are Test hundreds. When you look at the other players on that list, they're all great international players so my emotions relating to this achievement are qualified'.

He catches, in that brief paragraph, almost everything that make make him the figure that he is, the brooding symbol of an era. How much remorse echoes behind the words 'there was a Test match on at the time' - with its unspoken implication that he wasn't playing in it. Then the achknowlegement of a small group of people present who'd grasp exactly what he was feeling.

There's a tremendous wistfulness to his ambivalence, and it's gently heartbreaking that he doesn't feel worthy of his place on the list. He is. There may be only two Test hundreds, but they were high-quality ones, and there are few bowlers in the game that he hasn't bested sometime, somewhere. To put the achievement in context, Andrew Strauss made a hundred against Sri Lanka at the weekend. It was the 36th of his career. Ramprakash has been a phenomenon, and the rest is just life and its way.

NB: He also tells a good story about Dominic Cork selling him a bat for fifty quid. He got almost two thousand runs in a season with it. Corky's probably still got the fifty sheets, too...

Ramps: not there forever

Glamorgan and Leicestershire may be in meltdown, but the revolution at Surrey held together. Although you might want to read closely the reaction of coach Chris Adams to the news that Mark Ramprakash has gone in the fetlock playing football, and may miss the start of next season:

'It's just unfortunate that it's come at this stage of Mark's career... It is a blow but obviously we have to plan to be without him possibly in the opening weeks, if it comes to that, and it offers an opportunity for other players to show what they can do... Mark won't be there forever so someone has the opportunity to prove he can step up...'

We'll see what the brooding Heathcliff of county cricket makes of that, when he blows back in off the moors of winter...

The Enigma: Variations [part 232 in a series...]

Ed Smith, cricketer turned journo, is the latest to have a crack at the coding embedded in the enigma that is Mark Ramprakash, and others of his ilk. Ed got a whole BBC programme, an episode of Inside Sport called 'Is Professionalism Killing Sport?' to find out. And Ramps was once more a siren, singing him towards his doom on the rocks.

Smith has a double first from Cambridge [this fact is mentioned, breathlessly and often, in BBC pre-publicity] and perhaps it blinded his editors to the lack of rigour he brought to his argument. Or maybe, in fairness, he made a programme that later had a tabloid title imposed upon it. Either way, Ed ballsed it up.

He got such access too. His interviewees included the Dark Prince of English batsmen, alongside Ryan Giggs and Colin Montgomerie. Smith hung his theory on his own fleeting Test match career: 'Would I have scored more runs if I'd worried less about my technique and just relaxed?' he asked [answer: no]. This immediately muddied his position. He aligned relaxation with amateurism, and amateurism with a youthful enjoyment of the game.

Ryan Giggs rapidly exploded this theory, although the editors didn't seem to notice, when he explained that his best football came at the age of 30, when he'd become more professional, stopped drinking and trained harder.

Montgomerie was called in to comment on the case of Tiger Woods, Smith's Exhibit A, who had become 'joyless'. No more joyless, though, than when he was winning 14 Majors and a billion dollars as he slept with a succession of gorgeous women [oh Tiger, tell us, where did it all go wrong?].

And then Ramps, who gamely conceded on camera that he had never enjoyed playing for England. Not enjoyed facing Marshall, Walsh, Ambrose, Bishop, Waqar, Wasim, McGrath and Warne - good lord...

This was a good-hearted programme, but its strands needed unpicking. Amateurism was a smokescreen. There are exactly the same number of people at the top of sport as there were in the days of Spitfires and Denis Compton. They may approach their lives more formally now, but they occupy familiar ground. Relaxation, being able to perform under pressure, has nothing to do with amateurism, or childishness.

Giggs gave Smith the clue, when he described his famous FA Cup semi-final goal against Arsenal. 'What were you thinking about?' he was asked. 'Nothing' came the reply. Here is the key: entry into a state of pure instinct, unimpeded by conscious thought. The best have an ability to remove their brain from the equation. The physiology of that would make a truly interesting programme.

Smith's initial question of himself - would he have scored more runs if he'd thought less about technique - had a touch of ego about it. Here is another truth: ability has its ceiling, its outer limits. Anyone watching him bat could see that he had arrived at his. There is no shame in that.

He did not go away from Test cricket and make a hundred first class hundreds, as Ramprakash and Hick have done. Those vast, sad codas to their lives are in part acknowledgment of the unfulfillment, and of that part of themselves that they were unable to overcome. It was about the complex uncertainties of being human. That, though, doesn't fit easily into a catchy programme title.

A final point must be considered, and it's a brutal one too. Lots of the best sportsmen are a bit thick. It helps. Strangely, so does professionalism - from an early age, all they'll ever do is play, thus ensuring that a certain unawareness of the outside world persists.

One of cricket's great paradoxes is that in its simplicity, it is complex. It attracts thinkers, brooders, obsessives, and then it drives them mad. It really would help, Ed, if you were thick...

Ramps - the nightmare comes true

The doomsday scenario discussed here became a reality for Mark Ramprakash yesterday.

It was the first time he's been out in the 90s since 2005, making 32 hundreds in that time.

Runs, wickets, matchfixing, coppers... what's not to like?

Conventional wisdom says the county championship is boring. Conventional wisdom is wrong. It's only been back for two days, and there's already been a double hundred, a nine wicket bag, and, in tune with ineffable beauty of green England in spring, Mark Ramprakash not out overnight at the Oval. 

Oh, and there's been a matchfixing scandal too. Or there might have been, involving Essex. During the years of three-day Championship games, match-fixing went on every day, and no-one took any notice. Captains would get together, rubbish would be bowled, declarations would be agreed by both sides. No-one minded, because in three day games, it was the only way you could usually get a result. Those seem like distant and innocent times now. 

Essex, or a couple of Essex players, have allegedly bowled badly in a Pro-40 game. Inspector knacker, in the guise of the Essex constabulary, is on the case. Given the way Essex have played in recent years, they'll have a lot of evidence to sift through, distinguishing deliberate rubbish from the normal dreck.

Although the fuzz weren't naming names, most of the press were quick to report that one of the players was Danish Kaneria. The Times, though, was remarkably coy in this report. They just tacked on a seemingly unrelated paragraph at the end of the story... only as a hint, mind. Worried about getting sued, boys?

Even this wasn't the most amazing news of the season though. That came down at the Oval, where Surrey are under the leadership of 22-year-old Rory Hamilton-Brown. He's one of several big signings at the once-great, still-rich Brown Caps. Another is Chris Tremlett, from Hampshire. Remember him? Yup, so do Hampshire, that's why they let him go. Tremmers is absent from the first game against Derbyshire, being 'rested' in an 'effort to manage his workload'. Hamilton-Brown must have enjoyed reflecting on that as Chris Rogers reached his 200. Only six months to go, Rory...

Update: We can now officially cut the ribbon on the season. Ramps has gone past 100. Just the 18 boundaries in that. Some things are eternal.

State of England

Justin Langer's dissection of the English condition was the best thing in the papers this weekend, but even JL, frothing away at his keyboard in sunny Somerset, didn't pick up on one of our greatest traits: our telling weakness for the past.

We don't have a word for it, but the Portuguese do. It's saudade, which means something along the lines of 'nostalgia for a time and place that never really existed'. 

It's a very English concept when you think about it, and it's the one behind the calls for Mark Ramprakash to come back. There's a tremendous romance about the idea, for several reasons. Firstly, English cricket loves its old warriors - Washbrook, Cowdrey, Close, Steele, all called up for a last mission in front of the guns. We trust that concept for exactly the reasons Australia mistrust it: for what it says, for what it means. 

Ramprakash also embodies the desire for a happy ending, the need for reality to match up to the kind of redemptive storylines you get in novels and films. The weight of his fame [which comes in part from his success on reality TV] plays into it, too, as does the British sense of fair play. All of those runs must amount to something, after all. 

But is is nostalgia, it is romance. Ramprakash and Graeme Hick were my  favourite English players of their era. They mean more to me than Atherton or Hussain or Stewart; I'd rather watch either of them get 40 than see Thorpe get a hundred. They were special in their way. Ramprakash's achievements over the last four years have a great nobility about them because they've been built by his pure love of batting. 

Yet if Ramps played at the Oval, it wouldn't just be about England needing a number three. It would be about the baggage he brings with him, his own and ours. We'd be asking him to bat not for his future, but for his past. And that's a very English thing.

NB: Strangely, the one way it might work would be if Ramprakash were not the only change, and Key went in ahead of him. That would skew the expectation, redistribute the pressure more evenly, make it less about either of them and more about the team as a whole. Wonder what JL would do...

More Ramps, more soul

Lawrence Booth is another trying to unpick the soul of Mark Ramprakash, in a nice piece over at Cricinfo. The first Ramps hundred of the season can have that effect on a man.

In it, he draws attention to Nasser Hussain's effort on Ramprakash in Wisden. 'Mark,' Nasser asks from the wispy pages of the great yellow book, 'How can you still have the appetite for this?'

The question is more revealing than the answer, because it's a question predicated on the primacy of Test cricket. Its implication: once you've played Test matches, playing other games just isn't worth it.  

Setting aside the fact that asking Nasser Hussain to write about Mark Ramprakash is a bit like asking Dan Brown to write about Martin Amis, the notion that Ramprakash is compensating for his international failures with a long and bloody-minded mea culpa etched into the cricket grounds of England is underestimating both the complexity of the man and the game. His batting's not so much a mea culpa as a love letter.

Geoffrey Boycott has scored more first-class runs than anyone since the second world war. When he was forced to retire, he said he'd give up the rest of his life to have five more years at his best. It took cancer to draw the fire from that idea, but he says he still never picks up a bat because he finds it too painful. Any thought that Boycott's Test runs mean more to him than his Yorkshire runs gets short shrift. Boycott loved to bat, and I think Ramprakash loves to bat too.

Nasser Hussain was also a complex man, riven with self-doubt, some of it justified. His relationship with his father was key to his game and his personality. He let cricket go with a sense of relief, and after captaining England the relief was understandable. But Hussain wasn't Boycott and Boycott wasn't Ramprakash and Ramprakash wasn't Tendulkar and Tendulkar wasn't Steve Waugh and Steve Waugh wasn't Damian Martin. 

They all let go - or will let go - of the game differently, and the game occupies different spaces in their lives. There is no common experience there. Perhaps Mark Ramprakash is tortured. Perhaps he is unfulfilled. But perhaps he just loves to bat. Perhaps he knows that once he stops driving the ball so beautifully, once he stops making all of those hundreds, the feeling will never come back, will never be available to him again.

The aforementioned Martin Amis, another tremendous stylist, was once asked to play a game of snooker against another writer and do a piece about it. He wins the match, but ends his story: 'As for the snooker, to approach the televisual ideal by which we all measure ourselves, I'd have to do nothing else for the rest of my life. Then snooker might work out and measure up, with everything going where you want it to go, at the right weight and angle. Then snooker might feel like writing'.

For writing and Amis, substitute batting and Ramprakash. For Mark, I'd guess, it just feels right.

Ramps: Harbinger of Summer

The summer feels like it started, really started, this week. Mark Ramprakash made his first hundred of the new season. It was a late entry for the Bloodaxe; he was serving a ban incurred at the end of last year, perhaps the last real flaring of that famous temper. It was his 104th first class hundred and there are more to come as the wickets lose their green and the bowlers of England surrender once again to the majesty of his batting.

The epic coda of his career, these last few years of three-figure averages and unmatchable elegance, are the story of man paying his dues for his talent. No-one who has seen him bat for Surrey can feel shortchanged. Along with Kevin Pietersen, he has been the best player in the land.

The adjective that attaches itself to him is 'unfulfilled'. It's both fair and unfair. Ramprakash was unfulfilled by Test cricket, but not by the game. His career, and that of Graeme Hick, with whom the gods decreed he should share a Test debut, will become viewed as two of the last great careers of the pre-Twenty20 era. They might be the last men in history to score a hundred hundreds. 

Somehow it seems right that they should be tied together: one man who wanted it too much, another who didn't really want it at all, and who both arrived instead at a lower-key mastery, a day-in-day-out excellence that had its own demands. Is there anyone who would deny that lesser batsmen have had more success in Test cricket? Would anyone rather watch Nasser Hussain or Mike Atherton play?

The careers of Ramprakash and Hick are significant because cricket is about more than just Test matches, just as it's about more than just ODIs or T20. After all, they have both made enough Test bowlers look foolish in county cricket. 

Ramprakash also demands that we examine the notion of talent. It's just not good enough to say that his has somehow not been maximised. That's lazy thinking. As a pure exponent of the art of batting, he has excelled. You could show a film of him to anyone who has never seen the game and say, 'this is how it was meant to be done'. In achieving that, Ramps has paid his debt and left his mark. Catch him now, before it's too late.  

The Bloodaxe Also Rises

Mark Ramprakash signed a new, two-year contract with Surrey this week; it means that the great Bloodaxe will play on past 40. Failure, like Test cricket, is just a part of his past now, and the past, as we know, is another country. 

Today I imagined a future in which Ian Bell was dropped by England and had a couple of untidy, unfulfilling comebacks before retiring to county cricket and making mountains of runs, year after year.

If Bell plays in all of England's matches in 2009 (and let's face it...), by the time the first Ashes Test comes around he will have the same number of caps as Ramprakash - 52. Ramprakash's appearances were spread over a decade, Bell's over half that time. Ramprakash played during an era of loss and instability, Bell during the years of consistency and relative success. Sometimes, life really is all about timing.