My quest for shallow pictures continues, so here’s the shallowest one yet:

That’s: 16 games, 24 innings, 2 not outs, 1348 runs, highest score 284, average 61.04.  Five hundred pixels across but a mere thirteen deep.  Shallow!  But just a row of text, so cheating.

Allow me to explain.  (This is English county cricket, by the way.) The above numbers are in praise of Mark Ramprakash, who has had a miracle season for Surrey.  Now I know what you’re thinking.  Those aren’t Ramprakash’s stats.  No they’re not, but at least as remarkable as Ramprakash’s own numbers, Rampswise, are the numbers of the guy who came second.  Second, that is, in total number of runs scored in a season of four day county matches.

So now here are the Ramprakash numbers:

That average of over a hundred is getting talked about a lot, especially when you consider that he averaged over a hundred last season also, but the really impressive number is 678, which is how many more runs Ramprakash got in the season compared to Trescothick in second place.  After Trescothick come about half a dozen other guys with much the same total as he got.  Ramps towers above them all.  And Trescothick is in Division Two, with its Division Two bowlers.  Ramps is in Division One, and here the gap between Ramps and number two is very nearly 700.

Interestingly, both Ramprakash and Trescothick are qualified for England, but neither has actually been playing for England lately.  Why not?

Well, Trescothick did not that not long ago.  He starred in the 2005 Ashes series for instance.  But lately he has suffered from some kind of nervous condition about which cricket commentators in the know are reluctant to talk.  In the old days, I dare say they’d have called it Lack of Moral Fibre, but now it’s probably called something longer, less judgemental and more sympathetic.  As other batters step forward, Trescothick’s chances of getting back into the England side diminish.

And Ramprakash?  He also used to play for England, for a while, about ten years ago.  But he never did well enough, and eventually they just got sick of waiting for him to make as many runs as he should have and gave up on him.  England was his level of incompetence, or so it seemed.  See also: Graham Hick.

I know little about Ramprakash’s personality or inner world, but it’s as if he’s always been good enough to play for England, but having failed to get a good start, has subsequently been scared to.  As he’s got older, his chances of being picked again for England have inevitably receded, and so he has felt free to make more and more runs, without the danger of an England place being forced upon him, again.  He is now nearly forty, so an England recall is just about impossible, so the psychological shackles have been completely off.  And yes, I am trying to get linked to from here.

Ramprakash was unlucky in encountering the last flames from the mighty cricket dragon that was the Great West Indian Fast Bowling Assembly Line, i.e. Ambrose and Walsh when they were still all-conquering.  Maybe that put him off test cricket for ever.  I remember how he used to get into the twenties, batting really well, but then he’d get out.

As if further determined to signal his unwillingness to play for England, Ramprakash has also involved himself in Strictly Come Dancing.  Even worse, he won.  Nothing like dancing on the telly to put international selectors right off you.  See also: Darren Gough.  The other telly show they hate is: A Question of Sport.

But of course there is another way to look at it.  Maybe the people in charge of the England team didn’t handle Ramprakash right.  It would be interesting to know what the Surrey coaching staff feel about that proposition.  They certainly seem to know how to get the best out of the man.

I actually snapped a few photos of Ramprakash in action, when I went to the Oval last April.  None of them are very good, because I was there to see Shane Warne.

That’s Ramprakash, batting against Warne I think.

And that’s him, having been stumped off Udall, walking back to the pavilion.  Just previously he had hit Warne for six, but batting against Warne messed with his mind, I reckon, and he became vulnerable.  The following day, Surrey fell just short of the huge total they were chasing.  They were very close, but you get no points for losing in a close finish.  Had Ramprakash stuck around, who knows?  Surrey might have started their season as well as they ended it.  My guess is that Ramprakash learned from that episode.  In the final game of the season against Lancashire, in which he made over 300 runs for once out, he began his batting by just grinding the bowlers into the ground.  Only then did he, appropriately enough, take them to the cleaners.  Not that I saw any of that.  I just followed it on Ceefax, which is where the shallow pictures also came from.

The good news for me about all this is that in among chasing up Ramprakash stories, I found my way to something called Surrey TV.  Why not watch Ramps on that.  Don’t click on that if you don’t like noise on websites.

The commentator on the piece there about Ramprakash is Mark Church, Surrey’s indefatigable radio commentator.  I first learned about his commentating from Peter Briffa, commenting on this.  The Test Match Special commentators get all the glory, but they work in a huge team.  Church is more often than not on his own.

In other cricket news, England appear to be getting the hang of the one day game.  Compare this today, with this in 2006.  I blogged about that here, with another amazing Ceefax snap.  Trescothick got a hundred in that match and England got what looked like a good score.  But Sri Lanka beat it with twelve overs to spare.  The big difference seems to be the England bowling, which was a match loser then but is a match winner now.  Go Jimmy A.  (See picture number 5 here!)