Outside Cricket
In 2006, Ramprakash and Karen Hardy won the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing. The couple beat Matt Dawson, former England rugby player, and Lilia Kopylova in the final. Ramprakash was the second consecutive cricketer to win the show, following former England team mate Darren Gough.
He is a supporter of the Arsenal Football Club and plays for the Arsenal Ex-Pros and Celebrities side. He lived in Northwood, London, with his wife, Vandana (married in 1993 according to Hindu rituals in Birmingham), and his two daughters, Cara and Anya; but the couple were divorced in July 2010.
On 9 March 2008, Ramprakash appeared on the CBBC show Hider in the House, setting up dad Ian Smeeton, with Ian's wife Wendy, two children Will and Pippa Smeeton, and their friend Dougy in Cambridge. He completed all his challenges.
In a special edition of Strictly Come Dancing for Sport Relief on 14 March 2008, Ramprakash and partner Kara Tointon were the winners after performing a samba. In 2008, he appeared on a special Strictly Come Dancing episode of The Weakest Link, being the fifth one voted off.
He used to be on the books of Watford F.C. as a schoolboy, but gave up the game to concentrate on his cricket. He also did a stint as a P.E. teacher at St. Martin's School, Northwood, in 2003, teaching football for a brief period as a consideration for a job after cricket.
Read more about this topic: Mark Ramprakash
Famous quotes containing the word cricket:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)