The golden eagle with silver wings

Simon Lister meets Mark Ramprakash, a graceful genius with a fatal flaw

Mark Ramprakash: Never conquered the highest level © Getty Images

Cricket fans who follow Duncan Fletcher's New England have little need for regret. The other Test sides have been taken on and seen off and, for now, England are the best. The frustration and icy criticism of the past have melted under the sunshine of success. But hang on. There is a regret. It is Mark Ramprakash. Of course it is Ramprakash. It always will be.

Ramprakash, you see, was designed to win Test matches for England. He tore county attacks apart, beautifully. England's most handsome hitter for a decade was sharing a Middlesex dressing room with Mike Gatting, John Emburey and Desmond Haynes when his teenage peers were picking their spots behind the till of a Saturday job. He was given man-of-the-match awards before he was even a man. Inevitably he was picked for his country but what no one knew was that there was something missing from the design, a small flaw which meant he did not make runs when he played for England. Damn, it was a shame and no one knew why. It was like watching a golden eagle that had forgotten how to hunt. What was missing?

Ramprakash is sitting with a cup of tea at a health club in a very nice part of Middlesex; regulars at Lord's who miss him will take some succour from the fact that at least he still lives in the county. His baseball cap is pulled down low and he is wearing an Arsenal hoody. The eyes are Surrey brown. He must have answered the question about what was missing a thousand times - for others and himself. It requires a bit of momentum to muster the courage to ask it again, so first the talk is of Arsenal.

To keep fit in the winter Ramprakash plays in midfield for the Arsenal celebrity team. Someone called Marvin the Magician is right-back. "Believe me, he's no magician on the pitch," says Ramprakash, who also turns out for the Corinthian Casuals alongside his mate Alec Stewart. The opposition are mostly public schools, although the Corinthian ideal seemed to escape the boys of one well-known school in North London.

"It was like a pub game," remembers Ramprakash. "It was horrible and, when we got to the car park, the lads had gobbed all over Alec's Mercedes." Poor Gaffer.

There is no real need for football small talk, though. Ramprakash's cricket season has been memorable enough. Because Mark Butcher was injured, Ramprakash was captain of Surrey for much of the year but neither leader could prevent relegation in the Championship. Surrey had not played this badly for a decade. Their coach, the former Australia wicketkeeper Steve Rixon, left after two seasons. His parting words were that English county cricket was a "cesspool of mediocrity". Then there was the ball-tampering. Surrey were docked eight points because one of their players deliberately ripped the quarter-seam of the ball in a Championship game. The club insist they still do not know who did it but, according to Ramprakash, they considered making the side take lie-detector tests. Without the eight-point penalty, it would have been Middlesex, not Surrey, playing Division Two cricket in 2006.

You must have thought `But for that silly sod we'd still be in the top flight'? "Well, that's one way of looking at it." Is there another way? Who was it anyway? "I just don't know. I don't think it's fair to have suspicions on people. Look, we had five big sit-down chats in the dressing room about this and no one came forward. Only the person who did it knows who it was. The longer it went on the more worried they were about repercussions in public, and the club, well, they used a certain type of language - `we will find the culprit' - that didn't help him come forward."

Clearly what Surrey needed was Hercule Poirot to emerge from the steam of the shower area and say: "Gentlemen, ze berl-tamperer eez ..." The fact that the problem was never solved does not say much for the levels of trust in the Surrey dressing room. Not so, says Ramprakash, who is nothing if not loyal.

"I think I did everything I could. There were plenty of opportunities for the guys to talk openly. As captain I was approachable, a friend, but also truthful. The players didn't let me down; we let the county down. We let the badge down."

Several times he mentions that the side did not "work hard enough" last season. He does not mean just on the pitch. Ramprakash takes his job seriously and it makes him cross that others don't do the same - thinking about the diet, netting regularly, the strength work in the gym on the day off. There was not enough of that going on at Surrey last summer.

"We have a massive challenge in Division Two. There's no room for any arrogance about playing at unfashionable grounds. If that creeps in, we will not come up. There's a lot of soul-searching to be done because we are seen as a team of individuals." Is that true? He pauses and folds his arms. "Yes."

One of Rixon's biggest problems with the Surrey side was responsibility. Ramprakash has written a book - a diary of his season called Four More Weeks (Ramprakash: When do you reckon you'll be fit again, Butch? Mark Butcher: Four more weeks, mate). Three-quarters of the way through the season, when Surrey were getting into a spot of bother, Ramprakash wrote that he came across Rixon on the morning of a game laughing to himself in a resigned sort of way. He asked what the joke was and Rixon said he could not believe that of the 11 Surrey players only two, Ramprakash and Ali Brown, had bothered to have a net.

"Steve worked his nuts off to make Surrey successful," recalls Ramprakash now, "but some of us didn't understand what he wanted. He's a hard man and you have to earn his praise. He expects a good attitude and a good work ethic."

Rixon has Ramprakash's sympathy - to an extent. The Australian let it be known before he left that he valued "strong leadership". Ramprakash took that as a dig at his own style of captaincy. In his diary he wrote that he had gone down the road of "dishing out bollockings" when he was in charge at Middlesex. It did not work. Yet he is reluctant to criticise Rixon. The nearest he gets is by saying that the new coach, Alan Butcher, is the "right, sensible and logical" choice. But who do you like more? Who is better, Rixon or Butcher? Ramprakash laughs and shakes his head. He shoulders arms beautifully.

It is time for the England question. Here it comes. What was missing, Ramps? He rolls his eyes and politely says this is something he has answered so many times. Even so, his reply is extensive and fluent, perhaps because he has made the speech so regularly and perhaps because he has strong feelings about the matter. On paper few match him as a serial underachiever in Test cricket but Ramprakash - can this really be true? - insists he is happy with his international career.

"Several things go into the mix as to why I didn't perform better or more consistently at Test level. The first thing was, when I was a young player, I was massively confident but, when I was picked to play against West Indies in 1991, I never broke through the barrier by getting a Test fifty. Then I went to New Zealand and got left out. Played against Pakistan, out second ball. Dropped. And so I didn't have the same confidence I'd had before. From there on it was a real fight. My self-belief had been knocked. I wondered whether I belonged at Test level. Every time I got picked and then left out the pressure increased and it's very, very difficult to turn that around.

"If you pick out one thing a player has to have at the top level, it is self-belief. Ability-wise I could play all the bowlers but in that environment I felt the pressure and, because of what had happened before, that pressure seemed to grow tenfold.

"Having said that, I've got to give myself a bit of credit because I stuck at it and I performed at county level and batted my way back into the England side. People say, `He couldn't play at the top level', but mentally I think I'm extremely strong for sticking at it and coming through on that West Indies tour in 1997-98 when I got a hundred." And, if there was an emergency and Fletcher called, would you play for your country again? This time the reply is more hesitant.

"I'm just ... I'm not sure about the feeling ... of playing for England again because ... if you're going into a side, you want to feel backed, that you're first choice or, if you're not first choice, that at least people believe in you. Now clearly at the moment, you know, I'm not first choice or even near the reckoning. I'm not in the set-up and not talked about. Fine. I don't have any problem with it. But I think that, if you're picked, you've got to have the backing of the selectors ... and so clearly Ian Bell, for example, has that backing. To have five Tests on the trot against Australia and average 17 and finish with a pair and still get selected for the next tour when there's quite healthy competition - clearly he has the back ing. He's a very good player and will score lots of Test runs but there is a massive difference in the way he's been backed and the structure of England cricket now ... "

You wish you had that backing? "I don't. That's the funny thing and I surprise myself by saying that. I look back with a great deal of pride at my experiences and the ups and downs I went through. I had many, many great disappointments but I came through them and out the other side. From 1998 I had a period of some success in Test cricket. I'm thankful for what I had. I look back with no bitterness at all, knowing that I left no stone unturned in trying my best." So that is it. It was self-belief that was missing from the design. What a damn shame.

When a pal who has spoken to all the cricket greats a dozen times heard of this meeting with Mark Ramprakash he said: "They say he's changed. Mellowed, you know." It is a fair assessment. Would the old nickname `Bloodaxe' suit him so easily now? ("I dunno who came up with it," says Ramprakash. "Someone at Middlesex.") He still says what he feels but there is a mature measure to his conversation. There is strong loyalty to his team-mates and he is obviously happy at Surrey, despite their woes. (He does confess, though, that he kept his Middlesex jumpers; they are at home, with the rest of his kit.) But happily a little of the bloodaxe remains. Recently he had trouble sending some emails from home because his computer was playing up. Forty frustrating minutes later he took hold of an old Slazenger V12 that was lying near the machine. He now has an ex-computer. But, like all those county attacks, it will have been destroyed beautifully.