It was entirely fitting that Mark Ramprakash scored his hundredth hundred at Headingley on Saturday. It was there that he scored his first, some 19 seasons ago, and coming when it did, it was and has been completely overshadowed by events elsewhere.

After all, this is how it has been for him these past few years - honing his craft, if not quite in the cricketing wilderness, then certainly out of the limelight. He has been playing repertory, while the West End, an increasingly glitzier and well-funded West End, has been flourishing without him.

It is a quite staggering and magnificent achievement. It is worth thinking about the statistic for a moment, because a hundred is a magical figure and one that every cricketer can comprehend. Good or bad, every batsman knows how difficult it is, at times, to score one run, never mind a hundred. Good or bad, every batsman knows how hard it is to score that first century; some never do. Ramprakash, now, has passed that milestone a hundred times. He will probably be the last to do so.

He joins an elite group of 25, including some of the greatest batsmen to have played the game. Don Bradman is there, of course, as is Viv Richards and, maybe the grandaddy of them all, W.G. Grace.

Because of the amount of first-class cricket played in England it is an Anglo-centric list and so Ramprakash joins some of the great names of English batsmanship, names that roll off the tongue almost in homage to a glorious past: Hobbs, Hammond, Compton, Hutton and Cowdrey.

Stepping out of the area of his expertise somewhat, Paul Sheldon, the Surrey chief executive, reacted to the moment by describing Ramprakash as the “greatest batsman of his generation”. Had Sheldon limited his horizons to the English county game then there would have been only one person, Graeme Hick, who could have possibly quibbled with his assessment. In the past two decades they have milked county attacks to the tune of about 55,000 first-class runs and have been more feared on the circuit than any other players.

County cricket is a glorious thing in many ways: the comradeship, the variety of surroundings and the sheer fun if you are lucky enough, as I was, to play in a team that puts enjoyment at the heart of everything it does. It is also a grind: the cold days in April, when the ball nips around into unpadded parts of the body, and the grim days in September when the trophies have been hoovered up by other teams and there is nothing other than personal pride and professionalism to play for.

It is easy, and God knows I did it too often myself, to persuade yourself on such days that it doesn't really matter and that it is all right to coast along. For a long time, I reckoned that scoring runs when it really “mattered” was a sign of mental strength. I now realise that not scoring runs when it didn't “matter” was a sign of mental weakness - and of not being good enough to do it without the necessary amount of application.

For a long time I was suspicious of cricketers who gorged themselves in county cricket while wilting when put under scrutiny of a more intense pressure, or indeed batsmen who scored what I might have termed soft rather than tough runs. Me, I thought the whole point of playing professional cricket was to play and perform in front of a crowd, and to perform when it was most difficult. Otherwise what was the point?

I can now see that this was a fundamentally flawed (self-deluding?) notion. Craftsmanship for its own sake is to be admired no matter where and when it is seen. It was reading a passage in a brilliant essay by John Updike about Ted Williams, the baseball player, that made me change my mind. I think it is worth quoting because it touches on the qualities that have enabled Ramprakash to go on, year after year, scoring runs in the most mundane circumstances and surroundings and why it is this particular feature of his achievement that should be celebrated the most.

“Baseball,” Updike wrote, and here he might have been referring to county cricket as well, “is a game of the long season ... Irrelevance always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. In so far as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like the writer who only writes for money.”

It is hard to get away from Ramprakash's relative lack of success in Test cricket and as much as I understand the sentiments, I cannot agree with my predecessor on these pages when he said that Ramprakash's Test record was “unjust”. It is what it is. Sport is neither just nor unjust; it simply reflects time and again an absolute truth. Ramprakash was tried and tested many times in international cricket and more often than not he was found wanting.

But that is not relevant to the achievement at hand: the tears at Test level should not diminish the triumph at county level. Ramprakash's great glory is the way he has put the disappointments of his Test career to one side - the scale and frequency of which would have finished less dedicated craftsmen - and the way that he has been able to emerge notably happier (at least until the weeks before the final hurdle had been overcome), more relaxed, still wanting to hone his craft and still able to give of his best every time he has walked to the crease.

Sport, and life, is not so much about the days when the glittering prize is in your grasp, the crowd cheering, but about the days in between. Ramprakash has endured. He is not the greatest player of his generation - doesn't even come close - but he is one of the game's finest craftsmen. That is enough.

Leaving the captaincy will always be an emotional affair

Anyone who has spoken at the funeral of a family member will have sympathised with Michael Vaughan at his final press conference as England captain when his lips began trembling, his chin started to wobble, his voice broke and the tears came.

When I spoke at my grandad's funeral some years ago, I just could not control myself. It's a bastard when that happens.

In a strange way, leaving the England captaincy is a kind of bereavement; you have lost something that you have held dear, nurtured and cherished; something that has enabled you to build closer relationships with people than is the case in a “normal” line of work; and something that has given you the most challenging days of your professional life.

And then it's gone.

There are usually tears. Graham Gooch told his team in the dungeon that is the Headingley dressing-room at the conclusion of the Ashes match in 1993. There were tears then, too. There were tears from Nasser Hussain when he faced the media after stepping down in 2003.

Me? Well, I remember thinking to myself as I walked to my final press conference in Antigua in 1998 that I wasn't going to give the media the satisfaction of taking a peek into my soul - which just about sums up the tangled state the job gets you into - but there were tears in the dressing-room beforehand. I was pretty emotional when I told the players and then I looked up to see the likes of Hussain and Angus Fraser a bit red-rimmed around the eyes.

Then, just as it was all getting too much, Ashley Cowan, a feckless young bowler from Essex who had found himself on an England tour, much to his surprise and everyone else's, burst into the changing-room oblivious to the context of the moment. DJ Chickie's disco was in full swing outside, and Cowan, moving to the rhythm as he spoke, thought it would be a good idea if we joined in the fun. It was as good a way to move on as any.