No time for Ramps romance

In the 1988 NatWest final, Middlesex were set a modest target of 162 in 60 overs. They made a poor start, and things took a disastrous turn when Mike Gatting, the side's main batsman and captain, was run out without facing a ball. The young lad who had called him through for the cheeky single needed to stay out there and get runs, at least until his captain had calmed down, which he did to such good effect that his 56 won the cup and the Man of the Match award.

Over the next couple of years, Mark Ramprakash revealed himself as the finest batting prospect England had had for decades. It was surely inevitable that he would go on to play for England, score thousands of Test runs and be acclaimed as an all-time great. So confident of this outcome was I that when I saw him in a pizza joint in Cardiff the week following his Test debut, I waited until he had finished his meal and then asked him to autograph my Headingley match tickets, figuring that they would be worth a packet some day.

As we all now know, this was not one of my most accurate predictions, but at least I am not alone in having been wrong, wrong, wrongitty wrong.

In his excellent “What Sport Teaches Us About Life”, Ed Smith says that no subject has taken up more dressing-room conversation these last 20 years than why Ramps failed to succeed as a Test cricketer. In the current Wisden, Nasser Hussain pays tribute to Ramprakash and Graeme Hick, and whereas he can see how Hick failed to adapt to the harder world of Test cricket, he remains as puzzled as anyone else that the Ramprakash legend failed to materialise.

Thinking about calling him up as the knight in shining armour to save the Ashes would be a triumph of hope over experience. There is precedent, of course, in the shape of Cyril Washbrook being called up in 1956 after a five-year gap, or of Wilfred Rhodes making a reappearance at The Oval in 1926, but a crucial factor about them was that they had previously been major Test successes. All they had to do was remember how to perform magic, a very different requirement than to have to turn it on for almost the first time in your life.

For what it's worth, my Ramprakash theory is that he thrives on being the acknowledged top dog, the No. 1, the composite of Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker and James Bond who will always save the day, a status in which he has luxuriated at Middlesex and Surrey, but that when he has to prove himself all over again, as he clearly has to at Test level, he freezes. If this theory is correct – and there is plenty of evidence to back it up – then picking him for The Oval would be the usual disaster, and there would not even be the compensation of feeling that a new player had been blooded who might profit from the experience in the future.

Ramprakash was not the answer when the selectors asked who the next batting cab off the rank was before Headingley: they picked Trott in the squad. Surely if they are going to change the middle order, it is Trott who should be stepping in – otherwise what was he doing in Leeds last week?

I hero-worshipped Ramprakash through the 1990s. I desperately wanted him to succeed, and the romantic in me still does, but this is not the match for the Ramps Romance. The forthcoming Test is the Final Flingtoff. If English cricket is to fete a hero for winning us the Ashes, then the appointed talisman is Fred. Because if he can't do it, nobody can, not even Ramprakash.