Rollercoaster: Mark Ramprakash on five years as England's batting coach

Mark Ramprakash may have suspected something was amiss when, during the Antigua Test in the West Indies, he was the only member of the England coaching team not to have a one-on-one meeting with the new director of cricket Ashley Giles.

Still it came as something of a surprise when Giles informed him by telephone on Friday that he was not going to be part of England’s coaching set up for the Ashes this summer. He is contracted until September. 

But there are no hard feelings or sour grapes when we meet to record the Analyst Inside Cricket podcast on his favourite stamping ground - the Kia Oval - on Monday afternoon. Ramprakash made 33 first-class hundreds - one in every four innings - at The Oval where he averaged 70.

He became, of course, the fifth Surrey batsman to record a hundred 100s (the most registered by any county) in his illustrious career (he actually made 61 hundreds for Surrey to add to his 46 for Middlesex: I batted with him - briefly - when he recorded his first aged 19, a battling 128 on a tricky Headingley pitch.)

^{Ramprakash with England opener Keaton Jennings}

Instead he is proud of the relationships he’s built with the players.

"I’ve worked hard to nurture them, improve them, but also challenge them. Hopefully I’ve helped them in their learning and in dealing with the pressures of international cricket," he says.

"I’ve got every sympathy for the modern-day batsman trying to make runs at the top of the order in Test cricket. The red ball has moved prodigiously in the last three years. Even someone with all the experience and skill of Alastair Cook has found it incredibly difficult. In an ideal world it would have been good to have had more stability at the top of the order."

He cites a number of reasons for that instability, not least the lack of preparation - as in warm-up matches - before Test series.

"If you come into a Test series and don’t find your feet straight away, it's very tough to come back. The bowlers are on top of you, there are no games between Tests. Where can you get your confidence from? It's not just an English thing either. Look at how some of those fine Indian batsmen also struggled last summer."

His views on England’s Test match inconsistencies are interesting, and relate not just to the dominance of white-ball cricket but also to England’s predominance of allrounders.

"The current philosophy in white ball cricket is ‘see it, hit it.’ You can do that when the ball doesn’t move. But Test cricket is much more challenging. You have to put in long hours to combat pace, swing, spin.

"There is a reason why England have a number of allrounders in both formats - because you get two bites of the cherry. If you’re struggling a little bit with the bat it takes the pressure off if you can take a three-fer with the ball or a few catches behind the stumps. To have all your eggs in one basket and be just a top order Test batsman is incredibly challenging."

As a perfectionist himself - who, before people start carping about his Test record, made 989 runs (average 44) in 14 Tests against a sequence of the top attacks of West Indies (away), South Africa (home) and Australia (away) in the late 1990s - he bemoans the lack of batsmen who are really devoted to their specialism.

^{Ramps in his Surrey playing days}

"We need more top-class players with good techniques who are really interested in the art of batting and prepared to adapt to conditions, like Che Pujara did for India in Australia. There are less players interested in doing those hard yards."

Ramprakash was an industrious and thoughtful coach, who had definitely done the hard yards himself and had the added value of exceptional versatility with the sidearm (known colloquially as the dog stick) - able to produce all manner of deliveries - inswingers, outswingers, leg cutters, even back of the hand slower balls.

It was not his fault that England have been unable recently to unearth anybody capable of batting a session without going for a big, booming drive. His replacement - presumably Graham Thorpe - will not find it any easier.