Mark Ramprakash celebrates his 50th birthday today. After his retirement in 2012, Barney Ronay, a confirmed ‘Rampraphile’, penned an ode to the typical 90s England cricketer for the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.
Last summer, with his retirement still reassuringly distant, Mark Ramprakash gave a speech at Lord’s in which he confided that, if he could go back and change any aspect of a magisterial, furiously intense, operatically unyielding 26-season career, he would perhaps like to have “taken things a little less seriously”.
For the confirmed Rampraphile it was hard to know how to respond. Certainly, as career retrospectives go, it’s up there with Eric Cantona announcing that perhaps he shouldn’t have bothered being quite so enigmatic; Jean-Paul Sartre coming out in his dotage against berets and casual sex; or The Clash wishing they’d just been a little less cross about everything and spent more time on The Kenny Everett Show.
A Ramprakash who takes things a little less seriously. This is, of course, not just alarming and undesirable. It is also pretty much unimaginable. Across all disciplines there is a certain kind of sportsman who becomes, inexorably, public property – just as Ramprakash has long been cherished as an object of private fascination for a generation of diffuse, faithful, still painfully expectant career Rampraphiles.
And yet he embraced the smaller stage with inspirational zeal. What Stakhanovite commitment! What reproachful tenacity! In scoring 50,651 career runs Ramprakash ran at least 380 miles, or the entire length of England, with a bat in his hand. To the last there remained a purity to his cricket, and in his departure an accompanying sense of wider ending.
Let’s face it: no one is going to do this again in a hurry. The list of those who have scored 100 first-class hundreds runs from WG Grace (1895) to MR Ramprakash (2008). Currently, domestic cricket looks so fractured and frayed, so distracted by the promiscuous global whirligig of format-shift and calendar overload that it seems possible the list may in fact now be closed for ever.
With Ramprakash’s departure, the 1990s may have finally receded, but he remains a perhaps unexpectedly ennobling presence: cuffs buttoned, defensive bat gymnastically thrust, unshakable in his absolute conviction that this – all of this – really, really matters.
