A world without Ramprakash?

One of the grandest unfulfilled talents in English cricket's recent history - Mark Ramprakash - has gone worryingly quiet this season writes Barney Ronay in the Guardian. And the author is worried that as the season draws towards its autumnal hibernation, Ramprakash might unexpectedly retire.

I should say this is based solely on pessimistic intuition. Ramprakash has another year on his Surrey contract. He has simply gone a little quiet in recent weeks. But still there are worrying signs. He has a single hundred this season. A while ago he was given out "obstructing the field", an incident that has an air of alienating weirdness about it. Plus Alistair Brown has just retired, another Surrey-tinged 41-year-old, whose bat in his mid-1990s pomp made an extraordinary cracking sound, like a man cleaving an antique pine front door in half with a single blow from a fairground strongman mallet.