Not Worthy of a Thread - interesting articles, thoughts etc

[Red Bear]

Jus read this on The Guardian, as a follower of Surrey Cricket and having watched Ramps plunder runs the last 5-6 years you cant help but imagine if he'd ever fulfilled his ability at test level how good he could have been

Imagine a world without Mark Ramprakash. You can't. It's impossible | Barney Ronay | Sport | The Guardian

Imagine a world without Mark Ramprakash. You can't. It's impossible

One of the grandest unfulfilled talents in English cricket's recent history has gone worryingly quiet this season

Barney Ronay


Mark Ramprakash struggled for England
Mark Ramprakash's Test record is disappointing for one of England's finest batting talents. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian

There are many different ways to go about taking sport too seriously. In football this instinct is expressed mainly through anger. Everybody is cross. Everybody is an idiot. This is simply football now. The kind of relentless paranoiac fury that, in the 1950s, would have led to incarceration in some remote, high windowed Californian facility where tweed-jacketed men inject you with LSD and ask if you know who the president is, is now considered entirely normal.

In cricket this urge is expressed in less tribal fashion, often by a dogged, weepily saturnine attachment to certain players. Neville Cardus once wrote about his own youthful obsession with the England left-armer Colin Blythe, a boyish, sensitively neckerchiefed figure whom Cardus imagined from afar to be an impoverished aristo in exile, a reedy‑voiced aesthete and poet. Cardus wrote of his great shock on finally edging close to his hero on the outfield only to hear the dreamy Blythe – who was from Deptford – yelling something along the lines of "Ged aht av it ahl fakin do yah" in a voice like dirty sandpaper.

It is with a similar sense of fan-boy entitlement that I would like to raise my own concerns about the most talented English batsman of his generation. I'm worried about Mark Ramprakash. Worried, as the season draws towards its autumnal hibernation, that he might unexpectedly retire. Ramprakash! The ageless snake-hipped mini colossus. Imagine a cricketing world without him. I know. You can't. It's impossible.

I should say this is based solely on pessimistic intuition. Ramprakash has another year on his Surrey contract. He has simply gone a little quiet in recent weeks. But still there are worrying signs. He has a single hundred this season. A while ago he was given out "obstructing the field", an incident that has an air of alienating weirdness about it. Plus Alistair Brown has just retired, another Surrey-tinged 41-year-old, whose bat in his mid-1990s pomp made an extraordinary cracking sound, like a man cleaving an antique pine front door in half with a single blow from a fairground strongman mallet.

This is perhaps a generational thing. Ramprakash remains my own, essential cricketer. He is The One. Everyone has a player like this, a cricketer who emerges beneath your childish gaze and whose talents become luminously vital. It is perhaps an unfortunate choice to have made, aligning my hopes with the grandest unfulfilled talent in English cricket's recent history, but we have no say in this and you basically get what you're given.

Ramprakash was 21 when he made his Test debut in 1991 against a supercharged West Indies pace attack. Graeme Hick, another player of beached greatness, made his debut in the same match, but where Ramprakash was frantically engaged even in failure, Hick always seemed gripped with embarrassment at the crease, marching off almost before his stumps had exploded behind him, carrying the flushed and penitent air of a man discovered unexpectedly by 25,000 strangers batting nude in a forest clearing.

For a while after his debut Ramprakash kept getting 27: lovely little miniature showpiece 27s. Before long he began to congeal and to tighten, eyes wide, choked into shotlessness by his own furiously trapped revs. It was the most gripping kind of underachievement, a vibrant talent unable to escape from its bottle and seeming to express completely the dominant tang of English cricket at the time, its stunted riches, its blockages, the sense of waste and gilded despair. Aye. It were proper champion.

And so Ramprakash's career is still defined by the hole at its centre. There were two superlative Test hundreds but the deluge never came, as though these were the only moments he was able to forget himself. For the past decade his greatness has been relentlessly slaked in the backroom bars of county cricket, driven perhaps by this sense of unfulfilment, which also seemed even to envelope the brief stint as a TV dancing champion, an episode that now looks like a metaphor for his entire county career, Ramps reeling off his frilly-shirted hip waggles with chillingly focused expertise as effigies of Ray Illingworth muttering "the boy Ramprakash … not good enough … not good enough" flicker past in the corner of his vision.

His last Test was in April 2002. He came close to a recall in 2009, but Jonathan Trott got the gig and has since blossomed inside his own profitable bubble, just as Ramprakash might have profited within the current supportive climate. This is the enduring conundrum. Stick Ramprakash in this England team and he'd probably make 23 Test hundreds and appear at the same time unduly content, oddly sated, somehow a little less compelling.

You wonder what may be next. Where will all that drive go? Perhaps he may become the world's most demented PE teacher, or a slightly frightening corporate motivational speaker. This clearly won't do. Ramprakash has been batting throughout my entire adult life, his own all-conquering parallel dimension still flickering just out of reach, a better world of right turns and moments seized and talent fully flowered. The fact is Ramprakash must never retire. He must never grow old or die. Instead, he must continue playing that quiveringly gymnastic on-drive, reproachfully harvesting his eight hundreds a year, a man still taking it all too seriously in a manner that remains both deliciously unfulfilled and majestically stoic.

Thought it was quite a good artcile anyway, worth a read

[Don Andres]

Australia news: Nathan Hauritz struck in face at nightclub | Australia Cricket News | ESPN Cricinfo

Hauritz needed "facial surgery"

[meh]

Australia news: Nathan Hauritz struck in face at nightclub | Australia Cricket News | ESPN Cricinfo

Hauritz needed "facial surgery"

Imagine if this happened to Symonds during his career, this would be front page and the media would tear him to pieces for putting himself in the situation.

It happens to Hauritz, and no-one bats an eye-lid. Shows the profile of Hauritz.

[Neville Neville]

Steve Smith needs facial surgery and I don't know if he's ever been in a nightclub in his life...

[James Pattinson]

Imagine if this happened to Symonds during his career, this would be front page and the media would tear him to pieces for putting himself in the situation.

It happens to Hauritz, and no-one bats an eye-lid. Shows the profile of Hauritz.

Same profile and ability in this case.

[Red Bear]

Steve Smith needs facial surgery and I don't know if he's ever been in a nightclub in his life...

You mean cubert farnsworth?

[Rumblah]

Australia news: Nathan Hauritz struck in face at nightclub | Australia Cricket News | ESPN Cricinfo

Hauritz needed "facial surgery"

I have family that live in Hervey Bay. Srsly they don't really have nightclubs there at all.

[Red Bear]

Surrey promoted

[Triptanes]

Australia news: Tim Nielsen stands down as Australia's coach | Cricket News | Sri Lanka v Australia | ESPN Cricinfo

Tim Nielsen has stood down as Australia's coach after helping the side to a series victory in Sri Lanka. Nielsen, who took over from John Buchanan in 2007, made the announcement after Australia played out a draw in the final Test at the SSC in Colombo, saying he accepted it was time to go as part of the fall-out from last summer's 3-1 Ashes defeat.

His decision means Australia will have an interim head coach - possibly one of the assistants, Justin Langer or Steve Rixon - for their upcoming tour of South Africa. Nielsen faced the prospect of having to reapply for the job as head coach after the Argus review recommended a more wide-ranging brief for the team's mentor.

[Axel.]

Michael Clarke wants Steve Rixon as coach | Herald Sun

Can anyone tell me a bit about him?

[TSYW]

Michael Clarke wants Steve Rixon as coach | Herald Sun

Can anyone tell me a bit about him?

Former NSW wicketkeeper, only experience I've had with him was at a clinic probably 4 or 5 years ago. I've heard many people mention that he is an excellent coach, and from my very brief time with him he certainly had an aura that I doubt Tim Nielsen has. That's not overly helpful though....

I agree with Shaun Marsh, and would like to see us have a dig at Micky Arthur.

[James Pattinson]

Speaking of NSW wicket keepers, Bad Haddin has taken 1 step towards quitting cricket forever.

He quits T20 internationals.

[meh]

Former NSW wicketkeeper, only experience I've had with him was at a clinic probably 4 or 5 years ago. I've heard many people mention that he is an excellent coach, and from my very brief time with him he certainly had an aura that I doubt Tim Nielsen has. That's not overly helpful though....

I agree with Shaun Marsh, and would like to see us have a dig at Micky Arthur.

Would if Micky Arthur got the job.

[Crosby2Malkin]

Have to laugh at Nielson scoring a job at SACA already.

Finally, an organisation that will celebrate his incompetence!

[James Pattinson]

Geoff Marsh named as the new coach of Sri Lanka.