That Mark Ramprakash will make the single three-figure score that he needs to join the exclusive 100 Club is one of life’s certainties, somewhere slightly below death and taxes and above the words “Flintoff” and “fresh injury worry”. The question is when.

Having made his 99th first-class hundred against Sussex two weeks ago, the first tilt at the landmark comes at the Rose Bowl today when Surrey play Hampshire. Ramprakash has scored only one hundred at the ground, but it was a big one (188) and an important one, in an innings victory at the end of last season. “That hundred helped to keep us in the top division and showed, not for the first time, that Ramprakash can deliver when it matters,” Alan Butcher, his coach at Surrey, said.

Some may say that his modest record in 52 Test matches for England - only two hundreds and an average of 27 - proves the opposite, but Ramprakash’s phenomenal run-making in recent years suggests that he became a new man in his mid-thirties. In the first 15 years of Ramprakash’s career he averaged just over 46. Decent, but nothing compared with his record for the past five years: 39 hundreds and an average of more than 84. His most recent Test was in 2002.

Surrey, who signed Ramprakash from Middlesex at the end of the 2000 season, have profited from him, so much so that Paul Sheldon, the county’s chief executive for the past 12 years, said: “Signing Ramprakash was the single biggest cricketing decision I’ve made here. He is the greatest batsman of his generation.”

As and when Ramprakash makes the historic hundred, he will become the 25th member of the 100 Club. Four of the 24 are Surrey men – Tom Hayward, Jack Hobbs, Andrew Sandham and John Edrich – and the county plan to name the restaurant at the top of the Brit Oval pavilion “The 100 Hundreds Bar”. The county are also discussing ways of commemorating Ramprakash in art, either through a portrait or a statue.

Ramprakash may be the last man to reach the landmark. With fewer first-class matches in a season and players retiring earlier, it is hard to see any present cricketers getting to 100. Justin Langer, with 82, is closest but is nearing the end of his career, while Alastair Cook, with 18 hundreds before his 23rd birthday, will have to play until he is 41 if he carries on scoring hundreds at his present rate.

Not that there is any shame in falling short of 100. C. B. Fry and Gordon Greenidge each played for more than 20 years and were among the finest batsmen of their time but stalled in the nineties. As did Mike Gatting, Ramprakash’s first county captain at Middlesex, who made 94.

“When I first saw him it was obvious he was very talented, very organised for a player that young,” Gatting said. “Don Bennett [the former coach] had discovered him and told me, ‘This boy’s going to be good, he could even be better than you.’ ” Middlesex were so convinced about him that he was picked, two days before his 19th birthday, for the 1988 NatWest Bank Trophy final at Lord’s against Worcestershire. He made 56 as Middlesex won by three wickets. “That said a lot about him,” Gatting said. “You don’t just shove people in, you have to think they can play.”

So why did that talent never take him to a place in the pantheon of great Test batsmen? “You need a lot of luck and I thought that once he got his first Test hundred [against West Indies in 1998] he would go on, but sadly he didn’t,” Gatting said. “He probably tried too hard and put himself under too much pressure.”

Perhaps it was only when he realised that he would never make it for England that Ramprakash allowed his natural talent to flow. “He has developed a lot of self-knowledge, which has made him more relaxed,” Butcher said. “He’s so obviously good enough to play for England, but at the age of 38 it would take a lot for the selectors to admit they were wrong.”

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