Ramps, "Mental Toughness" and Tangos

I've just finished reading "Strictly Me", Mark Ramprakash's awfully-titled autobiography and, if you put the dancing anecdote bookends to one side, it's on a level far above most player-penned sports books. Ramps, as he's known by those of us sad enough to care, is the archetypical cricketing enigma.

His record in county cricket is nothing short of phenomenal. He's scored 108 first class hundreds at 54.32 in a career that's been running 13 years and isn't done yet. He averaged over 100 for the 2006 and 2007 seasons. A century of centuries is a staggering achievement - only 24 other men have done it - and Ramprakash is likely to be the last to reach the milestone.

And yet for England, at the highest level, Ramps failed. Fifty-two Tests yielded just two centuries and 2350 runs at just over 27. For a batsman of his talent that's an awful return, and so his book is an exercise in justifying these failings to the public and, one would imagine, to himself.

Many of his justifications hold up. He was messed around by the England management throughout his career in a way that just wouldn't happen in the age of Belly, Colly, Swanny and Cooky. Ramps was asked to bat everywhere from one to seven in his Test career and not given a clear enough of what his role in the side was supposed to be by management. If Ian Bell or Paul Collingwood had made their Test débuts in the early nineties, their careers of failure interspersed with sporadic success would likely have gone the same way as Ramps'.

What really rankles with the Surrey batsman is the accusation that he always lacked the requisite "mental toughness" to succeed at the highest level. In fact, he devotes a whole chapter to laying out his case for having as tough a mind as anyone. Exhibit A for the defence seems to be "but I averaged 40-odd against Australia!", and not a whole lot else.

Now I don't really believe in "mental toughness" as a concept. It's Peter Moores and Steve McClaren-esque management speak, and we all know where that got us. No, I believe Ramps has as tough a mind as anyone. You don't get 100 hundreds without extraordinary levels of concentration.

His problem, reading through the book's lines, was the whole experience of transferring from domestic to international cricket. In his first five Tests, he recorded scores of 27, 27, 24, 13, 21, 29, 25, 25 and 19. Almost there, but not quite. At Middlesex he was the golden boy, Gatting's heir apparent. He scored runs, commanded respect even as a kid, and spoke his mind, often getting himself in trouble.

What comes out in the book is the emotional trauma a player goes through when he transfers from an environment where he's the first name on the team sheet to one where he's constantly fighting for his place and under never-ending pressure to perform. Confidence gets shot, you don't speak up, you're not one of the leading personalities in the dressing room.

The best example comes in 1999, just after Alec Stewart had been sacked following the quadrennial disaster that is England at the cricket World Cup. Ramps was called in, along with Nasser Hussain, for talks with the ECB about the team's future direction. What occurred is so damning that it really needs to be quoted in full:

"Well, my 'interview' lasted five minutes, while Nasser was in there for an hour. We were both asked for our opinions about the England set-up and what we would do if we were in charge, and obviously Nasser had a lot of views and no hesitation about putting them across. As for me, I didn't really have a lot to say. I actually didn't think I should have been there."

Nothing to say! Eight years of being messed around the order, moved in and out of the side and not given a clear role and he has nothing to say when they ask him how he'd shake things up. Ramps doesn't acknowledge the irony in the book that, by the time of this section, he's just spent 150 pages complaining about the England set-up and articulating it's 1990s problems. That feeling of being out of one's depth had silenced a voice that was infamous around the county circuit for being outspoken.