Time to forgive Ramprakash

Firsts are not always good things but, with the exception of Worcestershire’s ground spending most of the summer doing a passable impression of the River Avon, the newly-done-and-dusted English season has been chockfull of extremely pleasant firsts.

First trophy won by Durham, the youngest first-class county (and nearly a second). First List A total to come within a four of 500 (Surrey, unfortunately, had the misfortune to do it in mid-April, after which the only way was down, as it proved). First sighting of an English legspinner capable of hitting Test hundreds since BT Bosanquet (and how sweetly, touchingly, apt that Adil Rashid should be a bequest to the nation courtesy of Yorkshire CCC, so long a no-fly zone for British Asians). First sighting of a gunslinging, matchwinning Caribbean fast bowler since Courtney hung up his holster. Pity Ottis Gibson is within sniffing distance of his 40th year, right?

But is it? Why should it be? Gibson is now not only the sole owner of the most sumptuously old-fashioned, roll-it-around-your-tongue name in the game now that Vasbert Drakes has retired, but also the Professional Cricketers’ Association’s inaugural MVP, having hoovered up more than 100 wickets in all formats while giving Durham’s late middle-order some oomph. Are there really four fast bowlers qualified to play for West Indies right now who have any reason to believe they could have done any better? (Messrs Powell and Taylor have been on the circuit over the past month or so, so they know whereof I speak.)

Which brings us to the most surprising of these jolly good firsts. Namely, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, now coming to the end of his illustrious reign as cricket correspondent of The Times, declaring in Tuesday’s paper that the England selectors no longer had any excuse not to recall Mark Ramprakash, another 38-year-old, whose spoils over the past two seasons might have turned Bradman green. For the first time since Ramps, the greatest Test underachiever of his generation, was reborn as a national treasure, I read an assertion of that ilk by a leading cricket writer. CMJ and I do not concur on everything, or even much, but we are soul brothers on this.

Last year, in all four competitions, Ramps totted up a smidge under 3,000 runs, average 75. This year he tallied a dash under 2,800 at 80. Last year he collected 2,278 Championship runs, including eight centuries, at 105. This year, this time in the First Division, he pocketed 2,026 - more than 600 in excess of the next greediest batsman – this time with 10 hundreds, average 101. Nobody has posted back-to-back northern hemisphere summers of that ilk. Even when Denis Compton made 18 hundreds in 1947 he required 50 innings; Ramps’s 18 came in 48. And the way he went about constructing those monumental twin tons at The Oval in that dramatic finale against Lancashire, with nothing on the line for his team bar pride, suggested that hunger is in scant danger of waning.

Ten months ago, as we sat in the bowels of a BBC studio while he took a break from practising for his ultimately victorious turn on a television “reality” ballroom dancing show, he talked about a delay in his trigger movement, evidence, surely, of a more relaxed mind. This tiny adjustment, he felt, had been the key to this final smile-ful chapter of his intermittently brilliant but largely frustrating career, one noted most for the lousiest well-known average in Test history – 27.

He seemed strangely serene, quite different from the boy-man I had met outside Lord’s one Bank Holiday Monday in 1987 following his maiden first-class 50 on debut against Yorkshire. Back then he was a shy, handsome 17-year-old of mixed parentage (Irish mother, Guyanan father) at sixth-form college in Harrow. I’d been educated nearby – and nearly attended the same school as him - so there was some common ground. In that BBC studio, having not seen him for a couple of years, what struck me most was what was missing. The reticence that had prevented him meeting the world’s best bowlers on an equal footing, rooted in an apparently shallow self-belief, had gone.

For the first time since we’d met, he seemed at one with himself, as father as well as cricketer. Which was no mean feat, given that the tabloids were raking over his private life. Despite plying his trade in the Second Division of the Championship, he had just been voted Player of the Year by his fellow pros. Was this what he had craved? Was this proof, finally, of acceptance, of belonging? It was hard not to draw that conclusion. The past six months have done little to correct this impression.

Quietly, modestly, he said the only reason he had an earthly chance of winning this TV thingy was because of the footwork he had developed as a batsman. The sort of footwork that saw him reel off an unbeaten 266 in May against Sussex and, specifically, Mushtaq Ahmed, the outstanding county bowler of the past five summers, whose return of 1-178 was as close as he has come to impotence in that half-decade (admittedly, Bob Woolmer’s recent death was perhaps more significant). The sort of footwork that might just prevent Muttiah Muralitharan from overtaking Shane Warne’s Test wicket hoard as rapidly as expected come December.

For David Graveney and his chums to select Ramps to tour Sri Lanka would be both nostalgic and radical. The days of the ageing internationalist, after all, are supposedly over. Who plays at 38 anymore? More to the point, who picks anyone of 38 anymore? Not many, Benny. But why? This is supposed to be REPRESENTATIVE cricket. Coaches and managers have a favourite saying in these parts, and many others besides: if you’re good enough, you’re old enough. What about the converse? If you’re good enough, you’re young enough.

If you are likelier to come up against world-class opposition in county cricket than on any other contemporary domestic circuit – and the presence these past few summers of Murali, Warne, Ponting, Younis Khan, Inzamam, Laxman, Harbhajan, Kumble, Kaneria, Chanderpaul, Clarke and Clark suggests that might well be the case - how can an England team without Ramprakash be truly representative of the nation’s cricketing talent?

The message to the selectors is unequivocal, and should be vocalised as often as possible. As Spike Lee would doubtless have put it, had he had any interest in cricket whatsoever, do the right thing. Forgive Ramps.