Iris Gaines (Glenn Close): “You know I believe we have two lives.”
Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford): “How ... what do you mean?”
Iris Gaines: “The life we learn with and the life we live with after that.”
- The Natural.
Mark Ramprakash is trying to put his finger on the start of his second life.
He thinks the conception probably took place at The Oval in August 1997,
when he sat in the England dressing room during the final Test with
Australia and watched as his teammate, Adam Hollioake, returned after being
dismissed (for nought) by Shane Warne.
Warne had bowled a ball that had pitched on off-stump and gone straight.
Hollioake had left it and had his bails removed. “He walked into the
dressing room,” Ramprakash recalls, “and the TV is on. It’s showing a
replay. He looked at it and went, ‘Yeah, probably a bit close to leave that
one’. And I thought, ‘Mate, that is fantastic. What a great attitude’.”
Four years later, Ramprakash left Middlesex for Surrey (and Hollioake) and
reached a turning point. He started reading books and playing golf and
bought a season ticket at Arsenal. He began to relax and follow Hollioake’s
lead and enjoy the game. The results were staggering. Ramprakash was
transformed.
In 2006, he hit 150 in five consecutive games, evoking Bradman. Today, aged
38, he needs one more hundred to become the 25th player – and just the
seventh Englishman since the war – to harvest a century of centuries. It’s
one of the great milestones of the game and a feat that should secure his
place in the pantheon of great batsmen. It won’t. Why? Well, that would be
his first life.
We meet on a glorious Tuesday afternoon at the Rose Bowl in Hampshire. He
twists the cap on a bottle of Coke and we retire to a lounge with a splendid
view of the ground. He’s wearing a classy red T-shirt, cool designer shades
and looks years younger than his birth certificate states. But it’s the aura
that most surprises, the style and the eloquence. Ramprakash looks like a
star and exudes star quality. Shouldn’t he be at Lord’s this afternoon? This
is the enigma.
Exploring the enigma is fascinating. Thirty minutes of the interview have
passed and he has fended every question with Teflon detachment. It’s a
mystery. Wasn’t he once reputed for his dressing-room tirades? Didn’t they
once call him Bloodaxe? Who is this guy? What happened to his pulse?
Struggling, I try to engage him with a series of quotes A profile in Wisden,
ascribing his favourite professional memory to the match award at the
NatWest Trophy final of 1988, when, still 18, he impressed with his style
and charm and scored 56. “I was so young, so untouchable.”
He seems surprised. “I was quoted as saying that, was I?”
“Yeah.” “It doesn’t sound like something I would say.”
A profile on Cricinfo that divides his England career into five distinct
phases: adhesive beginner (1991), nervous wreck capable of shining only as a
stand-in (1992-97), solid achiever lacking only a top gear (1997-99),
blatant scapegoat (1999-2000) and seasoned spare part (200102).
He is not impressed. “I’m not interested in what Cricinfo think of my career.”
An observation (my favourite) that during his first life he played with a mind
ticking like a room full of a thousand clocks. “In all the decades, I’ve
never met a young man who so much needed to succeed. He was obsessed, and it
took him a long time to become merely single-minded.”
He’s had enough. “I don’t know where you are getting these quotes from,” he
responds, testily.
“That was from Peter Roebuck,” I reply.
“Okay, well let me throw this back at you: why would I be interested in what
Peter Roebuck has got to say about me? He has never shared a dressing room
with me. I have hardly ever spoken to the man. You are giving me these
quotes but I don’t know why you are expecting me to comment on them.”
“I’m interested in whether you agree with his assessment of who you were? What
you were?”
“Well, I will put it in my words, what I was. When I look back, it is very,
very simple; I wasn’t out partying; I wasn’t late to the ground; I didn’t
misbehave. I was a model professional but I was also ambitious, I had a
drive and a motivation to excel. I see it a lot when I go overseas to India,
Australia and South Africa - players who want to succeed. Here, it seems
more important to be a nice bloke and to get on with everybody. So, no, I am
very happy with how I was. The trick, of course, is to channel that ambition
- that’s where, I think, as I have got older, I have managed better.”
“Was the ambition obsessive?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says, “How do you judge? Did I love the game? Yeah, I loved
the game. I was very lucky that I had parents who took me to matches when I
was 11-years-old and as I grew up I loved playing . . . I loved playing the
game . . . but you see, every Tom, Dick and Harry had an opinion about how I
was as a person, as a player. People who didn’t even speak to me, who didn’t
even know me; it was all done on hearsay. I felt it was unfair. That’s why,
when I hear quotes like that . . . I’m not interested in Cricinfo and what
they say about me. If Mike Gatting has got something to say about me, I am
interested. Or Alan Butcher, you know, the coach here (at Surrey).” HIS
FIRST life. The conception might have been the Christmas of 1977, when he
wrestled the wrapping paper from his first proper cricket bat at the age of
eight. His parents were civil servants. He had a sister, Zara. Home was a
small semi in Wealdstone, in the London borough of Harrow, and it was here,
on the long concrete driveway, that his batting style was shaped.
Football was another passion. He signed schoolboy forms with Watford and
flirted with the game as a profession until a trip to the Arsenal training
ground one afternoon and a 7-0 defeat. He was a better cricketer, and honed
his bat at Middlesex under the tutelage of Desmond Haynes and Gatting. In
1987 - still at sixth form college - his “coolly aggressive” debut “invoked
Denis Compton” (Wisden). A year later he was the star of that NatWest final.
In 1991, he was selected to face the West Indies in the first Test at
Headingley. Live television; sell-out crowd; Courtney Walsh; he reflects on
it now and winces. Rarely has a beginning felt more like an end. “We came up
one or two days before the game,” he recalls, “and had a bit of practice. I
looked around me at Graham Gooch and Robin Smith and Allan Lamb and thought:
‘This is the England side. These are the best 12 cricketers in England. I’m
not sure I belong here’.
“With hindsight, I don’t think I should have been selected at that time . . .
the England team was very much individuals coming together and there was no
real effort to get people together off the field. The set-up is different
now. A lot of the debutants have done well because they have been
welcomed-in and things have been made easier to make the transition.”
Ramprakash survived the five summer Tests but the scars were slow to heal. A
few months later, eager to impress in a warm-up during the tour to New
Zealand, he pulped his bat in a dressing-room fit after failing to score a
run. Gooch had a word and tried to settle him down but he struggled again
that summer against Pakistan and his confidence was shot.
The more he tried, the quicker he failed. The pressure became unbearable. His
Test average at Lords, his home ground, was an extraordinary 10.8. How could
he perform so brilliantly for Middlesex and so poorly for England? This was
the Ramprakash enigma.
“I was in and out of the side in the 1990s. It was very, very tough. Even when
I made runs, I knew I’d be out of the side after a couple of bad games. The
pressure was always there. Sometimes it’s hard to step back and take a look
at things. It wasn’t until the 1998 series (his first Test hundred came
against the West Indies) that I managed to find a way of dealing with the
pressure.” His last game for England was against New Zealand in Auckland in
2002. He had crossed the Thames to Surrey; his second life as a cricketer
was starting to bloom but the England coach, Duncan Fletcher, had stopped
believing. In his book, Behind the Shades, Fletcher says: “On that trip, I
saw in his eyes that he was shot at this level.”
Ramprakash rejects the charge. “I don’t see how I could be shot at that level
when I had got 100 against Australia only a few matches before. I don’t
think that makes sense.”
But his friend, Nasser Hussain, the England captain, also believed he was
gone.
“Have you read Nasser’s book?” I inquire.
“I’ve read a few. I haven’t got onto Nasser’s but I have read a few . . .
people like Boycott, Gooch, Robin Smith.”
“You weren’t interested in what Nasser had to say about you?”
“I just haven’t got around to buying it.”
“Do you want me to tell you?” “Yeah, I don’t mind.” “Okay, again, I’m
interested in whether you think this is an accurate observation.
‘It’s a tremendous shame Mark Ramprakash has never fulfilled his potential
as an England player. He has magnificent natural talent, much more than the
likes of me and Atherton. He was a world-class player, or should have been.
Ramps had it all: the technique, the shots, the aggression, the discipline.
In his training and his healthy eating he was very like Stewie (Alec
Stewart), and they got on well because they were so similar, but Alec was
very straightforward in his attitude to batting: he just went and did it.
Ramps was more like me, with theories, nervousness, bat handle obsession and
stuff like that. Maybe we had similar upbringings, similar dads. But Mark
Ramprakash should have achieved more in the game, should certainly have
played more Tests than me, and it’s a great shame he didn’t. I just hope it
doesn’t eat at him. It doesn’t seem to bother him now, for he has still
achieved a lot, still had a good career in cricket with England, Middlesex
and Surrey. It just shows what a thin dividing line there can be between the
great and those who underachieve’.
“Hmmm,” he muses, taking a sip from his drink. “Well, a lot of that is very
fair. He’s right when he says that nothing eats at me, and I don’t have any
regrets because I know I tried my best at the time, so I am perfectly
comfortable with that. Obviously, we shared a dressing room and he is
entitled to his opinion but that doesn’t mean he is right. I know that some
of the things that Michael Atherton has said I disagree with. But they’re
his points of view.”
“Do you disagree with anything Nasser said?”
“Well, when he said ‘there is a fine line between the great and an
underachiever’. Well, I don’t feel, in some respects, I underachieved. I was
dealt some cards and I dealt with them as best I could, given the
circumstances. One thing I know is that it was not through lack of training
or lack of trying to listen to other players or learn from the game.”
“So do you categorically reject that you underachieved, given your ability?”
“No, no, no. I don’t categorically reject that, what I’m saying is, ‘These are
the circumstances and this is what I achieved’. People will say, ‘Well, the
stats don’t lie’ or ‘Okay, so he has got 99 hundreds but he should have done
better at Test level’. And I would love to have done better at Test level,
but the fact is that the start I had, I felt, really set me back. I lost
confidence. It was a very difficult time.”
“Does that irritate you?” I ask. “The tag of ‘the great underachiever?’”
“I am very, very proud of what I achieved,” he says. “I played 52 times for
England, 52 Test matches. I have played against some fantastic players,
legends of the game. I played throughout the 1990s, when the standard of
cricket was very high and there were some very good teams knocking around. I
had so many knocks, so many low scores, so many setbacks, and have shown a
lot of mental toughness to keep going – despite the blows. I think it’s
important for me to put that over . . . it’s very easy to get tagged.”
“Yes, we like putting tags on people,” I observe.
“We do, yeah,” he concurs. “That’s just the way it is.”
“What about the perception: ‘Well, he couldn’t do it on the biggest stage?’
Doesn’t that eat away at you?”
“Well, that’s not true,” he counters, “because I scored two Test hundreds
against two good attacks. The Australia attack in 2001 is considered one of
the best ever. So that doesn’t hold true. Would I have liked to have done
better? Yes. Absolutely. Do I think I could have done things differently? Of
course, yeah. I would love to have known the things then that I know now.
But I am happy in the knowledge that I tried my best at the time.”
He still dreams of a happy ending with England. “The position hasn’t changed,”
he says. “I have told the England selectors that I am available. I’m
enjoying my cricket. You hope, like anybody else, that if you score runs you
put your name in the hat for selection.”
MARK RAMPRAKASH'S HIGHLIGHTS AND LOWLIGHTS
Mark Ramprakash is one century away from becoming the 25th player to score 100
fi rst-class hundreds
His breakdown of 100s is: 46 for Middlesex, 46 for Surrey, three for England
on tour, two in Tests (against Australia, inset, and West Indies), one for
Rest of England and one for England A
Ramprakash has scored 13 double hundreds and his highest score is 301 not out
for Surrey against Northamptonshire in 2006
First hundred (v Yorkshire, Leeds, 1989)
‘The wicket was a bit uneven and it was a good attack with Paul Jarvis, Arnie
Sidebottom and Phil Carrick. We won a close-fought game, so it was a hundred
needed by the team. It was a huge moment for me because it was my fi rst full
season and though I’d got some fifties I’d never gone on’
Best hundreds
‘The two I scored in Test cricket were the most precious. The fi rst, against
West Indies in Barbados, came as a huge relief as it had been a long time
coming, but it didn’t make me think I’d made it at Test level. The pitch was
good but any hundred against Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose has to be
pretty special. The other one, against Australia, came against what must be
one of the best attacks of all time - Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Brett Lee
and Jason Gillespie. I’d always felt at home playing at The Oval. That
helped’
Best hundreds in county cricket
‘When Surrey won the title in 2002, I scored an unbeaten century against
Lancashire when we were chasing more than 300. I also carried my bat for 113
for Middlesex against Kent on an uneven pitch at Lord’s. One of our openers
was unwell, so I volunteered. I remember Phil Tufnell [the last man] came in
with 25 needed to win, and we got that down to fi ve needed, then he was
caught at silly mid-off’
Worst hundred
‘Surrey against Cambridge University in 2002. They set a 7-2 leg-side field
with five men on the boundary and I was forced to eke out singles. It was
hard work’
Biggest hundred (301 v Northants, 2006)
‘A few weeks earlier, I was caught on the boundary on 292 when we were looking
to declare, so it was nice to fi nally get to 300. Like getting to 100 and
200 for the fi rst time, until you’ve done it you wonder whether you can.
It’s a challenge really. It takes a lot of concentration not to play a slack
shot for so long’
When he scored his centuries:
1989 1
1990 5
1991 3
1992 3
1993 2
1994 5
1995 10
1996 4
1997 6
1998 6
1999 2
2000 4
2001 5
2002 4
2003 6
2004 7
2005 6
2006 8
2007 10
2008 2
