When, for the next year anyway, Mark Ramprakash signs up as the England batting coach across all formats, as seems likely to happen in the very near future, the team will be gaining the wisdom of 25 years in the game. They will learn from someone who has experienced the highs and, more pertinently, the lows of international cricket; but who was, along with Graeme Hick, the most prolific county batsman of his generation and, indisputably, the best technician.
There will be the knowledge gained from scoring almost 36,000 runs in first-class cricket, including 114 centuries (which given the nature of cricket these days will almost certainly make him the last to achieve a hundred first-class hundreds) and the acknowledgement that only two of these came in the 52 Tests he played. When it comes to cricket, few can identify with Kipling’s twin impostors quite as readily as Ramprakash.
Once, when a tyro, he was sufficiently volcanic in temperament that team-mates would hide if an eruption seemed imminent, with age he has mellowed and diversified. His coaching credentials are an impeccable level four, and wide ranging. There has already been work with the Lions and the full England squad as well as his role at Middlesex, so it should be a seamless transition into Graham Gooch’s old slot.
It might have been Graham Thorpe, Ramprakash’s old team-mate from Surrey, who remains the lead batting coach at the centre of excellence, and regarded by at least one member of the England hierarchy as the best he has encountered, who took the job. Thorpe’s reluctance to commit to the sort of international scheduling prevalent these days, which in the next year for example will involve more than 300 days away from home for those involved in everything, is understandable. He will not be the first coach to find such a prospect unreasonably onerous.
There is truth in the fact Ramprakash’s international record, at total odds with that at first-class level (except against Australia where he averages 42, against 27 overall) still tends to define his career, something he readily acknowledges and accepts. In today’s more controlled environment, with its central contracts, he might have flourished, as might Hick, but he was of his time, so no point in hypothesising. Of more relevance is how a coach is perceived. Do the credentials to be an elite coach in any case demand a previous career of high achievement at that level? The answer, of course, is an emphatic no.
Examples can be drawn from different sports: Sir Alex Ferguson and José Mourinho; Bob Torrance or Butch Harmon in golf; Nick Bollettieri in tennis. It is a coach called Trent Woodhill who has been instrumental in helping David Warner become a world-class batsman in all forms of the game. There is a strong case for saying many of the highest achievers in sport make indifferent coaches for no better reason than they find it difficult to empathise with those of lesser ability or talent who find a struggle they might have seen as routine. Masterclasses are one thing; coaching per se quite another.
Ramprakash and I have known each other for a long time, and have always got on very well. I like him and can say I have never been more delighted for a player than when he scored the first of his Test hundreds in Bridgetown. We last chatted during one of his previous stints with England during the summer and he told me then about some of his coaching philosophy. He could, he said, readily draw on his own experiences, identifying in particular with those who have what he called “ ups and downs”, for example Sam Robson, who found it hard to live up to the expectation garnered by his prolific Lions and county performances; or Joe Root, who even at his young age has gone through a trough but appears now to have climbed from it.
He recognises the difference between working with younger players of less experience finding their way and with whom he feels able to empathise; and those mature batsmen such as Ian Bell or Alastair Cook, who will have their own ideas and for whom instead he has acted as a sounding board.
Along the way, I suspect Ramprakash will expound a philosophy not dissimilar to that of Gooch. His job is as much, if not more, to do with helping batsmen understand how to score runs – pitch assessment and that of the bowling; scoring areas; shot selection; when to attack and when to defend – as technical tinkering. That Ramprakash’s intensity, the overbearing pressure to succeed he placed on himself, proved his international downfall does not mean he did not understand what was needed. As my father told me, you do not need to be able to drive to know the way across town.
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