Caring too much isn’t the sole province of the sports fan. Perhaps the players I have most in common with are those who couldn’t quite put their own game into perspective.
At the start of the 1990s the two finest young talents in England were – almost incontestably – Mark Ramprakash and Graeme Hick. They were both brilliant batsmen. Throughout their long careers they were the scourge of every county side; no batsman in the country came close to matching their dominance. Unfortunately, that is rarely the first thing posterity remembers about them. Instead we talk, wistfully or whiningly, of their abject inability to do the same job for England.
Ramprakash and Hick arrived on the international scene garlanded with praise and expectation; by the end of the nineties both wore the lead mantle of unfulfilled potential. They became accidental symbols of England’s fragility. Whenever they failed to impose themselves on their opponents, whenever they wilted in the white heat of Test cricket’s spotlight, they reflected the team’s wider weaknesses. Their problems, which seemed so entirely in their own heads, became emblematic of the national side’s own psychological frailty.
My mum and I were divided on their advantages. I had a soft spot for Hick, the soft-faced giant who would loom benignly at the back of the balcony or the wicket celebrations. He had a generous smile and a gap in his front teeth, and he looked like a man of simple tastes and humble character, the kind who would get led into trouble by a wily village girl in a George Eliot novel. He looked like the kind of man you could rely on, no matter how often his scores proved the opposite. Whatever the numbers said – and they often translated as ‘failed’, ‘failed miserably’ and ‘blew it’ – I would still get a completely contrary reassurance from seeing his name on the teamsheet.
My mum always favoured the flash kid, Ramprakash, who had a cover drive to die for, and a pair of sparkly eyes set above a pair of perfect cheekbones. I suspect my mother had very conflicted feelings towards Ramprakash, who looked like a Prince Charming off the pitch but, at the crease, seemed to need some serious mothering. Caught in some bowler’s crosshairs, his fear and stress apparent in every false move and tentative stroke, Ramprakash roused her most maternal instincts.
Mum loved to see him do well. As a result, she used a rather different yardstick for his achievements than for anyone else’s. ‘It’s nice to see Ramps make some runs,’ she’d say, as he battled to 35. Or, ‘He’ll feel a bit better about himself now,’ as he took a simple catch at short leg. I, who had far less patience, would try to call her out on this blatant lowering of standards. ‘You’ve got to give him a proper chance,’ Mum would say. ‘It takes some people a while to come out of their shell.’
She was proved right eventually, although not necessarily by Ramprakash’s England career. My family have been avid Strictly Come Dancing viewers since its very first series; my sister has learned more about cricket from watching Darren Gough, Phil Tufnell and Michael Vaughan fleckle their way around the floor than she ever did in the years that Mum and I tortured her by trying to teach her the game’s ineffable intricacies. Ramprakash seemed an odd choice for the show: an introvert who was clearly uncomfortable with the emotion and physicality of it all. But, over the course of 12 weeks of Saturday nights and Sunday results shows, Mum and Kate and I saw him transform from someone with a horror of flashing his chest in the Latin numbers to a spotlight darling.
Ramprakash’s successful campaign owed no little part to the many, many votes phoned in from my parents’ house (Mum justified the phone bill to my dad by reminding him that all the money was going to Children in Need). When he triumphed in the final, Mum cried. And while this isn’t necessarily a unique occurrence – Mum also cries at black-and-white war films, Morecambe and Wise sketches and Facebook videos of elephants – I know it was because it represented the metamorphosis he could never manage for England.
So she’s jealous when I tell her that I’m going to meet him. ‘Ooooh, you’re going to see Ramps?’ she says, in the strangely high, girlish voice she slips into when she’s too excited to be her serious-woman-of-substance self. ‘Can I come?’ I pretend to consider her request for a second. ‘No.’
Wandering out of St John’s Wood tube station to meet him, I feel a stab of guilt. Mum and I have walked this pavement together every year since she first introduced me to the game. Over the course of the Tests and one-dayers we’ve attended together, Lord’s has taken on a special significance for us. It has been a proving ground for me, and every year has marked my progress towards becoming a grown-up woman, someone who could be her equal. With every match we sat side by side in the plastic tip-up seats – indulging in adult occupations like doing the crossword and drinking sparkling wine – I became a little less her daughter and more her friend.
It’s also our home ground, and our many visits have given me a sense of ownership of it; by the time my tread reaches the Wellington Hospital it’s pretty much a swagger. I should really walk all the way round to the Grace Gates to state my business, but I’ve always preferred the more convenient North Gate, and with my gilding of confidence I nod at the security guard and stride past him without breaking step. I can’t quite believe it when that works.
Skirting the Nursery Ground, I arrive at the shiny cube of the indoor school. Ramprakash isn’t here yet, and there’s no one practising in the nets this morning, so I can stick my head between the tall green curtains and catch a glimpse without fear of a broken nose. I’ve never liked indoor cricket nets particularly – noisy places with the acoustics of a swimming pool and something of its humid air; the constant gunshot of bat hitting ball, chased around an echoing space by a garble of instructions, usually makes me feel queasy. But this is empty, still, immaculate. It feels like a cathedral.
At the reception a noticeboard advertises clinics and coaching courses, and also the upstairs café, where you can order a burger and fries half an hour before the end of your session. (It’s nice to know that even in this uber-professional environment, the amateur ethos still lives strong.) I head up there to see if I can get a coffee, but the shutters are down, and there’s a small but serious-looking meeting taking place at one of the tables. I wander back outside to the Nursery Ground. Ramprakash arrives, and greets me with a flash of a smile. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ he says.
‘No worries. I’m afraid the café’s closed.’
‘Shall we walk to the high street? There’ll be plenty of places there.’
We head up the road, and I glance at the shops in recognition. The newsagent where I pick up a paper on the way to the game. The charity shop that can provide emergency sunhats or scarves, depending on the weather. The Jewish deli where I once blundered in with a hangover and asked for a bacon sandwich. I feel another twinge of guilt that Mum’s not here, especially since Ramprakash is turning out to be exactly as charming in person as she has always imagined him.
He’s wearing a crisp, dark overcoat, a navy scarf running elegantly along its lapels. He looks just as debonair as he did in white-tie-and-tails on Strictly and asks polite questions with a quiet, gentlemanly air. All the other cricketers I have met have looked like someone you might chat to in a pub; Ramprakash looks like someone you’d talk to in his limo as he’s driven to a meeting. We cross the road to a smart-looking café; inside there are only one other set of diners, a trio of women in their fifties. One of them looks up as we enter and does a double-take, as if spotting an old friend. ‘It’s . . . Mark!’ she says, before she can stop herself, or work out how she knows him. ‘Hi,’ he says, smiling and offering his hand, rescuing her from embarrassment. It’s one of the most gentlemanly things I’ve seen.
We take a table in the corner and order some coffee and pastries. He sits stilly and waits for my questions. I feel a bit tongue-tied. I want to ask about his difficult years – the nervous innings, the single-figure scores – but I don’t want to seem rude. You can’t just turn up and remind a man that, between 1991 and 1997, he averaged 17.20. You can’t say to a man who’s played for England 52 times, ‘Why weren’t you better?’
So I ask him about the year he met Steve Bull. For most of the nineties, England’s tours had been run along the old, amateur lines; players travelled abroad with just a tour manager and a physiotherapist. But as the decade went on, and their woes continued, the idea of taking a more professional route was, gradually, taking hold. Bull was the first sports psychologist assigned to accompany an England team on tour, and Ramprakash has said in the past that meeting Bull was a significant moment for him. ‘Very much so,’ he says. ‘We had two or three chats and all of a sudden where Test cricket had been an ordeal for me, suddenly I had someone to speak to about it.’
It’s strange to hear that he had no one to talk to before. He frowns a little, then nods. ‘There’s no doubt that I could have tried to seek out advice from people better before. I should have tried to do that.’ It sounds, I say, like he thought he was supposed to handle everything by himself. ‘That was me. I’m introverted and at that time I was very tunnel-visioned. It was all about the cricket. I wasn’t very self-aware . . . and back then, there was an onus on the player taking responsibility for their own career. For want of a better expression, getting his shit together.’
He flashes a smile, and I giggle, possibly too much. I’m feeling pretty out of my depth. I had already torn a flaky chunk off my croissant and begun the messy process of dismemberment when I realised that Ramprakash was eating his raisin Danish with a knife and fork. And sitting opposite him as I am, there is one fact I can’t avoid or, apparently, handle. Ramprakash is handsome. Properly handsome. He is, as Derek Zoolander would say, ‘Really, really, ridiculously good-looking.’ He has the eyes of the mysterious stranger in a daytime soap, the one with a hypnotic stare and a dangerous past. They can pierce you with a penetrating look, then crease into something impossibly winning. As for that smile, he keeps it in reserve, like a matinée idol. There’s a wry, half-smile here, and a quick twinkle of teeth there. Then, when he unleashes the full thing, you feel like you’ve won the lottery.
I drag myself back to reality, and realise he’s talking about the mid-nineties, the very period I have been scared to bring up. ‘It had become an ordeal in terms of the nerves and the anxiety and the pressure I placed on myself,’ he’s saying. ‘What I didn’t do well enough was control my emotions.’
Before the days he learned to channel his simmering fury into an Argentine tango, his temper was rather less refined. Ramprakash, the man who could look so timid and out of his depth at the crease, was a champion bat-thrower. Dave Roberts, England’s physio in the early nineties, remembers a time Ramprakash got out for a duck, marched straight into the dressing-room showers, bat in hand, and smashed every shower-head off the wall. And yet he sits here, so well-mannered, so suave. I can’t imagine it, I tell him. I can’t picture this raging, swearing alter ego, this desecrator of bathroom fittings.
‘I didn’t handle the bad days very well at all,’ he says, thoughtfully. ‘So on a good day I would be hardworking, professional, ambitious. And on a bad day I was intense, not able to express my true feelings, not able to see the big picture. And there’s lots of bad days in cricket, that’s inevitable.’ Especially as a batsman, when a single good ball can scupper you? ‘Exactly. So I think far too often I let things get on top of me and I didn’t have a way of being philosophical about how to handle the ups and downs of a cricket career.’
As a fan, you’re constantly agonising: what if the umpire had given that lbw against Steve Waugh? What if Atherton hadn’t played at that McGrath delivery? How much happier would my life be, right now? We fans love to think that no one else understands what we’re going through. And that’s true because – quite rightly – no one cares. We create anxieties out of nothing, then inflate and indulge them. It’s the kind of pathological behaviour that, if it concerned anything but sport, would see many of us assigned to a psychiatrist’s care. But society accommodates it, so our friends and family are expected to tolerate our babyish reactions.
When England were on the slide, I was either snappish and petulant or self-pitying and morose. When they won, I was unbearably loud and filthily smug. I’m surprised I didn’t lose friends during the height of my cricket mania, but I was probably worse to strangers. If some poor sap was introduced to me and told that I liked cricket, and then responded with a self-deprecating: ‘I don’t know much about cricket, I’ve always found it a bit boring,’ they would be trapped in a blast of righteous anger and lectured about the joys of the game until they succumbed either to my argument or a protective coma.
Of course, for Ramprakash, cricket wasn’t just a game, it was a career. It was his livelihood, his public identity, and the root of his ambition and pride. It was, in his words, ‘all-consuming’. No wonder he was described as intense. ‘If the team was losing, or I wasn’t performing, I found it very difficult to relax away from the ground and make friends and have great times and stuff like that. I wasn’t able to deal with the whole environment, really. I can recognise that now.’
Ramprakash had played cricket with Nasser Hussain and Michael Atherton since he was 14, but even their support wasn’t enough. ‘I remember in 1994, Mike Atherton put me at number three against West Indies. He placed a lot of belief in me by doing that, which was great, but I never really believed I should have been batting there because I hadn’t established myself in the side.’ He would fail, and fall into a rage, and push people away. ‘But if I was feeling down that I’d got out, the worst thing that you could do to me was ignore me and give me space. When I’d calmed down I really valued someone coming and talking to me.’
We pause to consider this vicious circle, and to eat our pastries. In the background, Elvis is singing a song about loneliness. Anyway, says Ramprakash, 1997, that’s when he finally started to tackle the problem: ‘I was drafted in to the last Test match at The Oval and I had dinner with Alec Stewart one evening before the game. I was talking about the difficulties of the pitch, but he was very certain: “You’ve got to go out and play your own way. If it’s there to hit, hit it, and what will be will be.” One of the things I’ve always admired about Alec Stewart and Graham Thorpe is they did exactly that.’
The pep talk worked – Ramps made 48, his first double-figure score in seven attempts. ‘And we beat Australia, and then I got picked for the tour of West Indies.’ Also on the tour was Steve Bull. ‘I remember talking to him in the hotel in Guyana, and for me it opened up a new world.’
Bull listened to him without judgement. And then he did something that no one had done before – he offered him practical tips on how to control his thought processes. Ramprakash started listening to music that helped him relax. He began visualising the next day’s play, ‘so that when I’m going into bat now I’ve almost rehearsed it the night before, the fall of the wicket, the noise of the crowd, taking guard, facing the first ball.’ He stopped thinking of batting as purely survival. He started picturing his idol, the West Indies legend Viv Richards, to help him remember the joy of batting, the freedom of scoring runs.
In the Guyana Test, Ramprakash top-scored in both England’s innings. And in the next match in Barbados, seven years into his international career, he scored his first Test century. Ramprakash looked assured and in control from the moment he walked to the middle, the horrors of the past entirely erased. His 154 was a showcase of all the exquisite shots we England fans had so rarely seen him play, and his feet skipped under him like Fred Astaire’s. He looked like a man who had fallen in love with his sport all over again.
At the time, I was having my own personal epiphany. I was going out with a boy. Tom was a medical student who lived upstairs from me, and I’d been smitten with him since my first summer at college. He was tall and attractive and brainy. We had middle-of-the-night conversations about things that felt profound and important. We played Frisbee. We went to parties where we drank ‘cocktails’ that were just vodka with orange juice and food colouring. I introduced Tom to my favourite poets, and he snuck me into a dissection class so I could stick my hand inside a human leg.
He wasn’t perfect. My most romantic dream was of cosying up with my new boyfriend on a grass bank, a wicker hamper overflowing with Frazzles and champagne while a game of cricket proceeded in gentle fashion before us. Unfortunately, Tom didn’t like cricket, and when I suggested an afternoon spent watching the university team take on Middlesex at Fenner’s, he gave the idea short shrift. I went alone, and sat in the icy cross-blast that blew straight from the Arctic, while a student called Ed Smith scored 40. If anyone had told me then that Ed Smith would later play for England, I might have ditched Tom altogether.
Actually, Tom and I seemed to spend most of our time breaking up or getting back together. He was a reluctant boyfriend and I was an over-eager girlfriend; it was, in that respect, a disastrous match. But we had plenty else in common, including a mutual taste for the dramatic, and while our friends got tired of the tears and the stormings out and the passionate, unexplained reunions, we didn’t. Nothing in my life had prepared me for the heaving, multi-coloured wash of feelings I was now experiencing. Love was, on the whole, a far more exhausting venture than I had pictured. I’m sure that a third of the tears I cried were just from fatigue.
By the summer of 1998, my relationship statistics were something along these lines:
College discos, dinners, parties: 50+
Actual dates where we went out, just the two of us, like grown-ups: 1
Postcards carrying what I thought were meaningful pictures (sent): 15
Letters containing what I thought was beautiful prose (sent): 6
Surprise bunches of flowers (received): 3
Conversations about our relationship: too many to count
Times he held my hair out of my face while I was sick: 2
Times I kissed one of his friends: 1
It was the last one that broke us up for good. I naively confessed to the crime, which had gone unseen by anyone else; I begged forgiveness and blamed the viciously magenta cocktails I’d been drinking. But Tom was growing tired of all the histrionics and, besides, this way he could spend his final year of university as a free man.
I had thought I knew what heartbreak was. All those times I had seen England’s batting splinter like matchsticks, or their bowlers squander match-winning positions, I had assumed that nothing could hurt more. Now I knew: following England had merely been a training ground. Each time I’d seen Atherton dismissed in single figures had just been practice for this barrage of misery, of waking up each morning to discover new bits of my heart that hurt.
Cricket was, apparently, the only language in which I could process my pain. ‘Tom rang,’ I wrote in my diary. ‘Managed to steer conversation to break-up and its stupidity. Tom executed superb backward defensive and blocked crease with stubborn refusal to talk about it.’ Later I wrote him a long letter using various sporting metaphors to explain how I was feeling, forgetting that none of them would mean anything to him. His reply included a note of tender concern: ‘I am a little worried at how your daily intake of sport seems to have affected you.’
In fact, it was the other way around. The break-up was seriously affecting my sporting consumption. England were playing South Africa in a home series, and were, for the first time in five years, being led by a new captain, Alec Stewart. But my heightened, headache-inducing emotions now eclipsed anything caused by their results. The question of whether Tom would ever go out with me again was far more important than what would happen in the next session of play. When Atherton scored his first century in over a year during the first Test, I barely noticed; when they collapsed in a heap in the second, it didn’t even leave a bruise.
The university year was over and I headed back home, where I spent a good week under a duvet and a cloud of self-pity. This was how I watched the third Test, a game that even the crowds had abandoned by the final day; the TV wide-shots struggled to hide a backdrop of empty stands. That was no one’s fault but England’s. It had been another rotten performance and, forced to follow on, they began the final session of the match six wickets down then lost Mark Ramprakash in the first over after tea. Defeat was inevitable. I kept watching anyway. Misery loves company.
Time passed. Two more wickets fell; the end was as nigh as Bill Nighy saying Night Night in his nightie. But Robert Croft stuck in his crease, clam-like, and Darren Gough, painfully curbing his usual flamboyant instincts, stayed with him for over an hour. It was the most boring innings Gough had ever played. It was also, perversely, the most gripping.
There were still seven overs of play remaining when Gough nicked to slip. Seven overs for the last man, Angus Fraser, to withstand: it was an eternity, especially with Allan Donald running in, his hair parted so he looked like the villain in a silent movie, missing only the pencil moustache. Every ball travelled smartly and purposefully towards Fraser’s feet and the stumps behind them – it would only take one to get through, or catch him on the pad, and Croft’s three-hour resistance would be in vain. After each delivery, Fraser turned and walked away from his crease, as if he didn’t trust himself to spend one more second in front of his wicket than he had to. I leaned in to the screen, feeling suffocated.
In Donald’s last over of the day, I held my hands out in front of me, silently counting off the deliveries on my fingers. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. A thump – the ball hit Fraser’s pad – the entire South African team were screaming. I was screaming too: ‘No, no, NO!’ The umpire’s finger stayed down, the match was a draw, and I had entirely forgotten about Tom. England had dragged themselves out of the pit, and they had taken me with them.
My relationship with the team was changing. Take the captaincy, for instance. I had expected it to feel like an injustice and a betrayal, seeing Stewart lead the team out on to the pitch at the start of the summer, Atherton falling in behind, just one of the infantry. But it had turned out to be, at worst, a phantom ache. If I was honest with myself I actually felt a little relieved. When Atherton shed the burden of captaincy, a weight had fallen from my shoulders too. The outcome of each game suddenly felt far less personal. If England lost with Stewart as captain, I could always say, ‘I told you so.’
Paul at Cover Point had given me a summer job, and while I was still eating a ham sandwich every day, I had at least grown enough in confidence to eat it in my colleagues’ company. I sat listening to the conversations around me: serious, grown-up men with serious, grown-up opinions. I considered my own wide-eyed enthusiasm. It suddenly felt very unsophisticated. When Paul, for instance, asked, ‘What’s the score?’, he said it coolly, not with the breathy urgency of someone arriving at the hospital to which a loved one has just been admitted. The men around me experienced cricket, it seemed, in a very different way. It wasn’t that they cared any less than I did – if anything, they seemed more obsessed with the game. The guys at Cover Point talked about literally nothing else; they had fresh thoughts on the subject every moment, statistics easily at their recall, and could reminisce endlessly about past matches. But it was clear they didn’t love the England team the way I loved it. Their love wasn’t tender, or callow. Following England, to them, didn’t mean blind, devoted loyalty to a cause; it meant demanding a team that could compete. You didn’t prove your allegiance by defending your team’s weaknesses, but by showing you knew better than anyone else how to fix them.
More than anything, though, they loved the game itself. They wanted to see close contests, and intriguing battles, and brilliant players showcasing their skills. It didn’t matter who these skills belonged to, be they English or Indian, Sri Lankan or South African. I would come into the office to find them talking excitedly about yesterday’s ‘incredible game’ and the ‘brilliant result’ and feel completely confused, because England hadn’t been playing; it would turn out that they were talking about a World Cup qualifier between the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates, in which a welder from Utrecht had scored a whirlwind hundred.
Personally, I was always so caught up in my team’s results that the nature of the match – what Paul called ‘the beauty of the game’ – had never really occurred to me. To me, an exciting match was any that England looked like they were going to lose but managed to draw. The idea that I might be able to detach myself and appreciate a game for its sheer entertainment value was anathema.
The limits of this approach became apparent when I convinced The Cricketer magazine to let me report on a game for them. They sent me to cover the Princess of Wales Memorial Match between MCC and a Rest of the World XI at Lord’s, in which a constellation of stars, from Sachin Tendulkar to Brian Lara, were playing. I remember sitting in the press box feeling confused, because I didn’t know which side I was supposed to be supporting. My scribbled notes indicate that Tendulkar and Shivnarine Chanderpaul both hit sparkling hundreds but my piece for The Cricketer gave no detail on these, and concentrated, curiously, on the fact that the coin used for the toss was an 1848 florin. The magazine’s editor generously published it anyway, and paid me £40. I asked Paul to read it and give me some feedback. ‘Well,’ he said, in his typically blunt manner, ‘you didn’t actually write about the cricket.’
But I was getting an education, because England’s series against South Africa was turning out to be the sporting event of the summer. It’s traditional to compare a topsy-turvy match to a rollercoaster ride, but this resembled the entire amusement park. The big drop of the second Test was followed by a nerve-shredding cling to the wall-of-death at Old Trafford. The fourth Test turned out to be more like a pirate ship, the advantage lurching back and forth between the teams, until England were set a target of 247 runs in the final innings.
They were making it, too. They were 82 for 1 when Allan Donald came back on for the final spell of the day. Fired up, he speared a ball into the ground that leapt across Atherton, just grazing the batsman’s glove as he turned sharply out of its path. Atherton was still hopping gently on his back leg like a ballerina as the ball was caught by the wicketkeeper. Donald celebrated the catch, Atherton stood his ground, and South Africa appealed to umpire Steve Dunne. Dunne looked back at them like a chinless country parson from a Wodehouse novel asked to decide between two terrifying dowagers in the village cake contest. He glanced sheepishly down at his thumb. Atherton had got away with it.
Standing your ground when you know you are out is a contentious area. It is not technically cheating, but it does run contrary to some people’s strongly held belief in the Spirit of Cricket. I had a vague, Sunday school notion of this Spirit. It was, I understood, like the Holy Ghost, a benign, bodiless godhead that looked over our shoulders, encouraging us to be better people; its high altar was Lord’s, its priests were the MCC, and its commandments were written down by human hands in The Laws of Cricket. I tended to invoke its name when England’s batsmen were getting bullied by West Indies fast bowlers, or when Shane Warne was over-appealing. But when it was a case of my favourite player doing the decent thing by admitting he was out, or keeping his head down and finishing the job, the Spirit of Cricket could kiss my ass.
Donald smiled at Atherton. It was not the smile of a man who has just encountered the appealing ambiguities of his sport and found them delightfully whimsical. It was the smile of a man who has just unmasked his wife’s lover and is already plotting his murder.
The half-hour of play that followed was a battle for all time. Donald bowled the angriest spell of his life. You could measure his rising levels of rage in the increasing speed and viciousness of the deliveries, and on his face you could read each thought as it appeared: ‘You cheating son of a bitch . . . I’m coming for you . . . I’m going to kill you.’ Atherton, by contrast, was fiercely impassive, his mouth set in a straight, uncompromising line. After every ball he stayed where he was and stared his enemy down. He was the silent, fearless hero of a Western, and Donald was his arch-villain, raining curses and threats, and howling in rage when one of his henchmen, Mark Boucher, dropped a catch.
I re-watched the spell recently; it was not, as I remembered it, merely a procession of projectiles whizzing past Atherton’s head. There was the one that Atherton hooked high in the air, chased by a sprinting Makhaya Ntini, his long legs straining, unsuccessfully, to reach the ball. There was a ball to Nasser Hussain that seemed at first sight to pass straight through the batsman’s body like a Victorian parlour trick. It was an epic spell, and one on which an entire summer hung. If Atherton or Hussain succumbed, there seemed no doubt that England would be scuttled, and the series would be lost there and then.
They survived. England won the Test; they went to the final game scores level. This was entirely new to me: an evenly matched series against a major opponent where my team had a chance – at least 50 per cent! – of winning. There was something different about that England side, too. They had never looked so organised, so in-sync, so like a . . . team. They took nerveless catches. They bowled with purpose. They celebrated wickets with great swoops of synchronised joy.
The last game was a microcosm of the summer: subtle and shifting, its result a secret until the very end. For the first time, I found myself appreciating, not dreading, its unexpected reversals – the ebbs and swells, advances and retreats were adding an entirely new dimension to a game I already loved. I was like a music lover who had been entirely satisfied with the facile burps of an off-kilter brass band, now hearing for the first time the grand strains of a symphony. It was what Paul had been talking about – the beauty of the game, regardless of the result.
The result wasn’t entirely irrelevant, of course. England won. They had beaten one of the world’s top-three teams in a full, five-Test series: in the five years that I had followed them, it was their greatest achievement. I remember Ramprakash taking a catch in that final victory – an incredible one-handed effort, at full stretch – that seemed to sum up England’s renewed confidence. In previous series you suspect he wouldn’t have got near that ball, but here he was, a salmon snatching a fly in mid-air.
Ramprakash didn’t score many runs that summer – his greatest contribution with the bat was a not-out half-century – but it’s clear, as we chat, that the series still means a great deal to him. ‘That win was massive,’ he says. ‘Because all summer we were told by our own media that we weren’t even worthy of taking the same field as them. All we heard about was how good Jonty Rhodes was, Hansie Cronje, how quick Allan Donald was. This is from our own media! And to bounce back and win was really fantastic.’
I tell him how strange it had felt, the day that England won, that I had no ceremony of my own to perform, no friends to go out and mark the occasion with. It turns out, however, that even England’s own celebrations were fairly limited. The domestic season wasn’t over, Ramprakash reminds me. There were still county games to prepare for, so even this, their biggest win in five years, only merited a half-hour of drinking beer in the dressing-room.
‘I think that group in ’98 were probably the best England side I played in,’ he says, thoughtfully. The team toured Australia that winter; they didn’t win the Ashes back, but they did at least put up a fight, holding out for a draw in the first Test, and pulling off a surprise win in the fourth, entirely against the run of play. ‘There was a lot of frustration building up in me that we were playing against this very, very good side and we couldn’t quite get over the line against them,’ Ramprakash recalls. ‘You’re always under the cosh. We were 2–0 down, got hammered at Perth and Adelaide. Every day you’re up against it.’
So the win in the fourth Test in Melbourne has always held a particular place in his heart. ‘I got a catch at square leg, and got very excited about it,’ Ramprakash smiles. And his new, less anxious approach to batting was paying dividends: he scored 379 runs, more than anyone but his friend Hussain, and finally felt he was contributing to the team. ‘I’d had some good games in the Caribbean, had a very tough series against South Africa, I then went away and topped the averages in Australia, so I had a great 18 months. I think I got over 1,000 runs in a calendar year at over 44, something like that, right?’
Of course he’s right. Cricketers, for all that they pretend they can’t remember their statistics, rarely get the good stuff wrong. Did he think he’d finally cracked it, I ask? That he’d conquered his demons to become a true England player, a deserving member of the team? ‘I’m not sure I ever felt that I’d cracked it,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘I’ll never forget, the next summer I got 0 in the first Test against New Zealand, which we won, and the second game we lost. After that I was going to be left out. I’d had 18 months in the side, topped the averages in the West Indies and Australia, and after two games, three innings, I was going to be left out. The only reason I wasn’t was that Nasser broke his fingernail or something’ – Ramprakash lets out a schoolboy snigger – ‘so he wasn’t in the side. I just look back at that and think, “You know what? I was never quite able to feel part of the England team.”’
The words are charged but his face is calm. I realise that the thing that makes Ramprakash so compelling is that he still feels completely unknowable. He’s honest about his England failings, open about his mental struggles, and yet I sense I’m only meeting the half of him. Somewhere beneath the surface charm is another person, someone you feel you’d be lucky to get to know.
I think of Hick, the man to whom the word ‘enigma’ was bonded like Araldite. He certainly didn’t look particularly enigmatic: tall, square-set, a cartoon version of himself. My life’s-worth of preconceptions are of a shy, silent man, someone who would rather smile a response than verbalise one. He made his debut in 1991 and played his last game for England in 2001, after a career that spanned 65 Tests and finished with both a better average and more first-class runs than Ramprakash. Still, I get the impression he’s not quite as beloved. Maybe it’s because he never did Strictly.
Hick moved to the Gold Coast four years ago, where he’s using his experiences to help coach the next generation of Australian players. He has talked openly about his past, and put his own batting struggles down to the fact that, in his head, he was always playing catch-up. As a Zimbabwean, it had taken him seven years to qualify to play for England, and during that time the great expectations surrounding him had mushroomed to Alice-in-Wonderland proportions. His first outings for England did not live up to them.
I ask Ramprakash about Hick – whether he ever compared himself with his similarly struggling teammate. Did they talk together about their common problems? Ramprakash shakes his head: ‘I think it would have been a good thing if we had. We never had dinner, we never really worked together outside of the cricket ground. Graeme was very introverted, a lovely, lovely man. I wish I’d got to know him a lot better – that’s a regret.’
We get up to leave. Ramprakash refuses to let me pay for our pastries, and disappears quietly to settle the bill. On his way back, the trio of ladies at the next table ask for their pictures with him. He smiles for the selfies and offers each woman demure but sincere thanks. They quiver lightly. He checks on the England score – they are closing in on a victory against Sri Lanka – and gives a small nod of satisfaction. Then he dons his elegant overcoat and shakes hands goodbye, leaving a small flutter of hearts behind him, mine among them.
It has become standard to measure both Ramprakash and Hick by what they failed to achieve, rather than what they did, and it’s tempting to imagine that these older, wiser versions, who have learned the key lesson of perspective, might have spared their younger selves a lot of pain. But how do you tell a young sportsman playing for his country not to care so much? It’s like telling a 19-year-old who’s just been dumped by her first love that she needn’t take it so hard.
Neither of them ever disavowed the game that caused them so much torment. Instead, they use their experiences as cautionary tales, advising and empathising with younger players in a way that no one helped them. It’s a reminder that sportsmen don’t have to be symbols, they can just be human beings. Ramprakash and Hick don’t need or deserve pity, and sportsmen who don’t have the careers we imagine for them don’t necessarily spend the rest of their lives feeling unfulfilled. Sport must have its losers as well as its winners. All a player can hope to do is to enjoy the ride they have.