Ravi Bopara hasn’t quite made up his mind, but T20 finals day at Edgbaston could be his farewell to English cricket.
At the age of 40, Bopara is still one of the cleanest hitters in the county game, as his blistering 45-ball century to inspire Northants Steelbacks to a shock quarter-final win over Surrey at the Oval proved. And while the lure of nights like that, and days like this, remains strong, he has coaching plans that he hopes will take him all the way to the top.
‘My ambitions as a coach are very similar to my ambitions as a player: to reach the absolute pinnacle,’ he says. ‘I’d love to coach England one day, and share my experiences from 25 years of playing cricket. I’ve got a lot to share, and I don’t want that to die with me.’
Bopara has already begun his ascent, coaching Karachi Kings at this year’s Pakistan Super League. He describes the experience as ‘eye-opening’, because it obliged him to put himself in others’ shoes in a way being a rank-and-file player does not.
And yet when he strikes the ball as powerfully as he did that night at the Oval, taking down an attack that included the Curran brothers, Chris Jordan and Gus Atkinson, it makes you wonder why he can’t delay the next phase of his career by a year or two.
Darren Lehmann, Northamptonshire’s Australian coach, has already sounded him out about playing another season, while Samit Patel – along with Bopara the only active county cricketer who took part in the first summer of the T20 boom, in 2003 – has been pestering him to team up in 2026 for one last fling.
Ravi Bopara’s blistering century against Surrey in the T20 Blast quarter-final was a reminder of just how clean a ball-striker he still is
Bopara, at 40, still does not know if he will return to the county game next season
The temptation is there, and Bopara is torn between the thrill of discovering ‘something new’ to his batting, and the attraction of both the golf course and of passing on his wisdom to the next generation.
There will be plenty to dispense. First picked for Test cricket at 22, he was dropped for more than a year after three successive ducks in Sri Lanka. But his response, away and home against West Indies, was sensational: three hundreds in a row, a feat previously achieved for England only by Herbert Sutcliffe, Denis Compton, Geoff Boycott and Graham Gooch.
Then, after playing in the first four Tests of the 2009 Ashes, he was dropped. His replacement, Jonathan Trott, scored a series-winning hundred at the Oval, and Bopara won only three more caps, leaving him with 13 in all, and 575 runs at an average of just under 32 – a fraction higher than Zak Crawley, who has won 59 caps and counting.
‘I’d have loved to play in this era,’ says Bopara. ‘Back in the day, if you got caught at mid-off, that was unacceptable. Now, you just look past it and you move on. That’s a great feeling as a batter. If you have that freedom when you walk out, you certainly feel a lot less pressure. Yes, there is a chance you get out, but you might end up scoring an unbelievable 100 that people will remember for ever.’
Did England ditch him too early? He thinks so. ‘I had no idea at that age. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I needed someone to go: “Hey mate, it’s fine. You haven’t scored runs in your first couple of Tests, but be aggressive, take them on”.
‘I’ve let England go, but probably my biggest regret is not playing for them after the age of 30, because that’s when I was playing my best, and came into my own.’
For now, there is a game to win in Birmingham – two, if the Steelbacks can see off Hampshire in the second semi-final, after Lancashire and Somerset contest the first.
Where would victory rank in a career that also brought him 158 white-ball caps, and 9,939 T20 runs for a variety of teams and franchises, placing him 19th in the all-time list, 17 runs ahead of Brendon McCullum?
‘I needed someone to go: “Hey mate, it’s fine. You haven’t scored runs in your first couple of Tests, but be aggressive, take them on”.’
Darren Lehmann, Northamptonshire’s Australian coach, has already sounded him out about playing another season
‘It would be up there with winning the 2019 T20 Blast with Essex,’ says Bopara. ‘That is my favorite day of my career – not the 100 at Lord’s against West Indies, not any other international game or the World Cup we won in the Caribbean in 2010.
‘When you do it for your county, on the biggest day of the year in county cricket, I promise you there’s not a better feeling.
‘If you’re a big dog playing for England, and you’re worried about Test cricket and the Ashes are coming up, you probably think it’s not that big a deal. But it is. It’s massive.’
And if Bopara can repeat his quarter-final heroics at Edgbaston, there’s a chance – however small – that the English game hasn’t quite seen the last of him.
