TOP batsman Mark Ramprakash said his New Year Honour for services to sport is the ‘icing on the cake’ of his quarter-of-a-century cricket career.
News of the Pinner resident being made MBE in the latest round of gongs comes just weeks after signing a coaching contract before Christmas to help the 1st and 2nd teams at his former club, Middlesex.
The 43-year-old told the Observer: “I was very pleasantly surprised. It came out of the blue and I’m really thrilled about it.”
Mr Ramprakash brought the curtain down on his playing career by padding up for a handful of games for Stanmore Cricket Club over the early part of last summer, returning to a club where he played in 1987 before moving to his first county cricket side in the shape of Middlesex and then on to Surrey.
He said: “It is a sad time to acknowledge you can’t play on any longer at the same level but to have the MBE is the icing on the cake of my playing career and I feel proud and satisfied with what I’ve done.
“It closes that chapter in my life and I’m looking forward to the new challenge in terms of coaching.”
Mr Ramprakash, who attended Gayton High School, now Harrow High School in Gayton Road, Harrow, and Harrow Weald Sixth Form College in Brookshill, Harrow Weald, which is now the Harrow Weald campus of Harrow College, is one of only 25 players in the history of the cricket to have scored 100 first-class centuries.
The father-of-two won over a new set of fans in 2006 when he and dance partner Karen Hardy triumphed in the fourth series of BBC 1’s Strictly Come Dancing.
n The managing director of Northolt Road medical products supplier Durbin plc was awarded OBE in the New Year Honours List for services to the pharmaceutical industry and to charity.
Leslie Morgan joined the firm in 1976 as a pharmacist and bought the company in 1999 before acquiring the trading arm of medical equipment and pharmaceutical supplies charity ECHO International Health Services in 2002.
