The Shorter Wisden 2013 (25 page)
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Authors: John Wisden,Co
In due course, he began to recite some thanks. Family. Friends. Management. Sponsors, some of whom had been with him from the very beginning, when a local bakery had sponsored his performances
at Mowbray Cricket Club in Tasmania. He thanked that club too, with a cough and a sniff. “It’s getting a bit harder.” No – there would be no tears. “The Mowbray
Cricket Club, if they see me up here like this at the moment, they’ll be all over me. That’s the place I learned the game, and the person I am was moulded from my background and my
upbringing. What you’ve seen over 17 years is a result of my early days at the Mowbray Cricket Club. Thanks to the boys back there.”
Cricket Australia. Cricket Tasmania. The pragmatist and the fantasist in Ponting showed through when he revealed that he knew when his next training was, for the Hobart Hurricanes in the Big
Bash League, and that as a result he would be in the vicinity of Bellerive Oval for the next Test. “Who knows, I might even be around for the first day of the game,” he joked. “If
I am, I might even join in the warm-up with the boys and see if there’s just one more chance!”
“The boys”: they came up a lot. It is funny how athletes always use the words when they are talking about team-mates. Once in a while, it’s “the guys”, but usually
discussion circles back to “the boys”. I dare say a detractor of sport would decide this is because sport keeps athletes in a state of arrested development, of perpetual childhood;
maybe there’s some truth in that. But it is perhaps also this that allows them to express themselves: when adult doubt and cynicism set in, it is time to go.
Not that Ponting finished his career as anything other than an adult. His wiry frame and sun-burnished face were those of a man who had seen the world; there was knowhow and wisdom on the game
he loved in his every utterance. But to see him to the very end throwing himself around at training, standing in the huddle, singing the team song, enjoying the banter, was to be reminded how sport
preserves in us the happiest parts of ourselves.
The boys: how he would miss them. And how they would miss him: not just his run-getting, but his body-and-soul commitment to the commonweal, audible in his voice as he watched Cowan taking his
catches, always upbeat, always encouraging, always urging them on. Now he was off to see them one last time as a player, with a final: “Thanks, everyone.” It was we, of course, who
should have been doing the thanking.
Gideon Haigh is a journalist. His latest book is
On Warne.
B
ARNEY
R
ONAY
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.
Even now it seems inconceivable that an English summer will be allowed to take place unaccompanied, for the first time in a quarter of a century, by the quiet certainty that at any given
moment on some distant patch of green ringed by sparsely peopled plastic seats, Ramprakash will be taking guard, dipping his knees, rehearsing with machine-gun ferocity that crisply laundered
off-drive, entirely gripped by the prospect of another six-month odyssey of largely overlooked first-class run-harvesting.
Naturally, Ramprakash will be defined to a degree by the greatness-shaped hole at the centre of his career, as a talent that remained forever sputtering and smoking on the launch pad of what
should have been a brilliant Test-match span. This is the ex-pro’s line, the baffled captain’s verdict: if only Ramps could have relaxed a little, laughed it up, taken a chill
pill.
This is also to misunderstand completely his broader appeal. If Ramprakash had a cricketing superpower, it was the ability to dust everything he touched – every cobwebbed outground,
every deathly four-day draw – with that distinct and indissoluble sense of gravity: he took guard 1,221 times with the same glowering, insatiable intent, and remained almost to the very end
the most vibrantly promising 41-year-old batsman in England.
It was all terribly serious. I can remember watching, gripped, as Ramprakash played out three consecutive maiden overs of lard-arsed roundarm all-sorts on some dying September afternoon at a
deserted Oval, bat raised like a lance, front knee flexed, off stump painstakingly aligned, a cricketing Don Quixote still toting about the imprint of his own vanishing greatness. Oh aye. It were
proper champion.
You see, though. This is what watching Ramprakash could do to you. Or at least, it could if you’d been there – and at an appropriately impressionable age – right from the
start. Because with Ramprakash’s passing something else has disappeared from view. Farewell, then, the 1990s. For English cricket you were the worst of times – and also the worst of
times. The most obviously talented batsman of England’s shredded generation, Ramprakash was also the last man standing, the
last reminder of that peculiar drowned
world, and nobody speaks to the ruined grandeur of a lost decade quite like Ramps.
For the adolescent spectator it was a genuinely compelling era to follow cricket in earnest. Presided over by mute, baffled men, with a Test team of tubby indispensables leavened by the usual
sweating, ruined debutants, each on-field humiliation seemed to peel away a fresh layer of frowsty pre-Victorian infrastructure, the whole sorry edifice crumbling away before our eyes like a lath
and plaster wall in the process of being cheerfully torn down by an Australian with a jackhammer.
Emerging into this, the young Ramprakash seemed an almost shockingly hopeful figure. Making his Test debut at 21 he looked, even then, curiously complete, rock-star handsome, the only modern
person in English cricket, coming out to bat already goggle-eyed with epic-scale obsession. At which point everything started to go wrong. Ramps and Test cricket: it was never really going to
work out. Wrong genius, wrong time.
Those who carry the scars of the 1990s can fantasise about the productivity of a young Ramprakash nestled within the velvet embrace of the current England regime (a two-year bedding-in period,
then 23 Test hundreds, 40 hundreds, 80 hundreds). Instead Ramprakash’s career was a masterpiece of departures. First dropped in August 1991, he was dropped in total 12 times, remaining on
the verge of being recalled by the England team – broken only by those tortured interludes when he was actually
in
the England team – for 18 years, or the entire adult life,
to that point, of this writer.
In between there were the horribly involving failures: a series against Pakistan where he seemed to have become, at last, entirely immobile at the crease, unable even to twitch or flinch or
blink as the ball thudded into the pads; followed by the driven-to-distraction dismissals of an extended mid-career congealment (I managed to crash my first car while listening in dismay to the
Test Match Special
description of one particularly rank caught behind off Nathan Astle’s slow-medium slingers).
There were two high-class Test hundreds, the second a brilliant 133 against Australia’s greatest Test attack, before that extended backwoods flowering at Surrey. The TV highlights reel
that accompanied news of Ramprakash’s retirement paid due respect here, the Test-match footage rapidly dwindling into a succession of wobbly county-ground shots: unworthy bowlers thrashed
through the pigeons at extra cover, half-track pies despatched with snake-hipped fury into semi-deserted stands, and finally that 100th hundred, celebrated by holding up a disappointingly small
bottle of champagne in front of not very many people at all.
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 W. G. Grace (1895) to M. R. 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, unslakable
in his absolute conviction that this – all of this – really, really matters.
Barney Ronay is a sportswriter and columnist for
The Guardian.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE ONE-DAY GAME
T
ANYA
A
LDRED
The cricketer of 1963 wore a woolly jumper, collected his wages in old money, and tidied his short hair to the side with a neat parting. But he was also a revolutionary. On May
1 – a year after the experimental four-county Midlands Knock-Out Cup – Lancashire and Leicestershire stepped out for the first match of the Gillette Cup at Old Trafford. It rained, and
the one-day game had to be finished on day two, with Lancashire winning by 101 runs and Brian Statham taking five for 28. But something had changed for ever: that September, 23,000 attended the
first Lord’s final, where Sussex squeezed out Worcestershire.
Fifty years later, domestic one-day cricket has pulled on a bewildering number of costumes: 65 overs, 60, 55, 50, 45, 40 and 20. There have been coloured clothes, floodlights, pinch-hitters,
Jacuzzis and miked-up fielders. Revitalised, endangered, usually a muddle, it has given immense pleasure.
Five men who loved playing it share their memories here, one from each decade. Norman Gifford, now back as Worcestershire’s spin-bowling coach, is lyrical about the 1960s; David Hughes
clever on Lancashire’s golden 1970s; Clive Radley modest about Middlesex in the 1980s; and Paul Smith idiosyncratic on Warwickshire’s dominance of the 1990s. Jeremy Snape completes the
story as he recalls his time at Gloucestershire and Leicestershire.
The 1960s – Norman Gifford
When the Gillette Cup started, we just played it like a normal three-day game, with three slips and a gully. Worcester had a strong side, and it wasn’t until we reached
the final that we came up against a team doing anything different. The Sussex captain Ted Dexter would put some thought into who he wanted to bowl, and what field he was after. It was a bit of a
shock: for someone of his stature to do that was significant.
Being at Lord’s for that first final was a tremendous experience. For those of us who hadn’t played Test cricket, it was a completely new experience: there weren’t many
watching the Championship in the 1960s. I was Man of the Match, even though we lost, and picked up a gold medallion.
During the decade, totals got bigger, and the game evolved. Batsmen became more inventive. When it started, they valued their wickets above all. The need to get runs on the board was foreign to
them – they had demons to overcome. Similarly, line-and-length bowlers found it difficult. People assumed medium-pacers and fast bowlers would be the most effective, but it soon became clear
we spinners were important too.
People remember the ’60s as a dull time for Championship cricket, although for us – winners in 1964 and ’65 – it was exciting. But for sides at the bottom it could be
run-of-the-mill. The one-day stuff suddenly gave them an opportunity to win something.
Standards of fitness are far greater now, but the equipment is better too. The boots for the quick bowlers used to be heavy and awkward, and the bats smaller. We certainly weren’t
acrobats. When the 40-overs John Player League was introduced in 1969, it was viewed by players as Twenty20 was in 2003.
But I loved all the one-day competitions, and wouldn’t have played as long as I did without them. I went to five finals – but lost all bloody five!
Gifford played for Worcestershire and Warwickshire between 1960 and 1988. He took four for 33 against Sussex in the first Gillette Cup final.
The 1970s – David Hughes
A lot of our guys had come out of the Lancashire and Yorkshire leagues, which were real cut-throat jobs, so we were steeled in one-day cricket. Most of our pre-season training
involved visits to RAF Sealand in north Wales, and the instructors used to put us through it.
We had lots of all-rounders, whereas many counties were picking the teams they had done in the 1960s, full of specialists. The quality of our fielding kept us apart: we didn’t carry
anyone, we all had strong arms, and we were quick. We won a lot of games by saving runs. And in Farokh Engineer and Clive Lloyd we had two of the best overseas players in the business.
Under Jack Bond’s captaincy we won five one-day trophies, including a hat-trick of Gillette Cups from 1970. We had huge crowds – maybe 25,000 – for most of our games. Other
teams were getting 5,000, and some were intimidated by the Old Trafford atmosphere. Lancastrians can be a noisy bunch.
