Thursday 5 July 2012

Mark Ramprakash: The Career of a Legend Part 1




At the age of 42, after a 25 year career spanning 4 decades, Mark Ramprakash has decided to retire from First Class cricket. Here is part one of three blogposts I have written about his illustrious career, between the years of 1987 and 2002.

Let me start by throwing a few stats at you. Mark Ravin Ramprakash has played a total of 461 First Class matches, a massive amount which with the way the modern day game is evolving, no-one will ever get near again. He is 38th in the list of all time leading run scorers in First Class Cricket, with 35,659; another stat that will never be reached again. Of the 37 people above him in the list, only 3 have a better average than his of 53.14. But he will most likely be remembered for his remarkable achievement of being the 25th, and likely the last, man to reach one hundred First Class centuries.

He made his First Class debut back in 1987 at age of just 17, and immediately made an impact scoring an unbeaten 63 for Middlesex against Yorkshire, and on July 20th 1989 he made his first First Class century at Headingley. From there on then, he began to get better and better. At the age of just 21, Ramps was selected for his first Test Match against the firepower bowling line up of the West Indies, which included the likes of Ambrose, Walsh and Marshall. He made 27 in both innings, and even though it wasn’t an excellent start, it was promising.

However, his Test career never really lit up, but while he continued to score heavily in county cricket for Middlesex, he was always in the selectors minds. It wasn’t until March 13th 1998, nearly 7 years after his debut, that Ramps made his first Test Match century, against the team he played on his debut, the West Indies. After being in and out of the team, he finally made another century against Australia in the Ashes of 2001 at his home ground the Oval.

The winter before his Ashes hundred, he moved south of the river to Surrey, a team who had won the County Championship in the previous two years. It didn’t take him long to make his mark at his new club, scoring 146 on his debut against Kent at the Oval in April 2001. At the end of his first season, he toured New Zealand with England, in what turned out to be his final test appearances. He finished his Test Career with 2350 runs at an average of 27.32 from 52 matches. Many compared him to Graeme Hick, who also struggled to adapt to international cricket, but was a prolific county batsman.

Check back here tomorrow for part 2 of my take on Mark Ramprakash’s career.

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