LANCASHIRE go into today’s final match of the 2008 cricket season against title-chasing Somerset needing seven points to be sure of avoiding relegation to the Second Division of the LV County Championship.

So while Old Trafford officials spent yesterday morning proudly showing off their plans to turn the ground into a 25,000 seater stadium fit to host an Ashes Test in 2013, Red Rose diehards might have argued that the next four days’ cricket in Taunton mattered just as much to them as the next three years’ redevelopment in Manchester.

And it was, in all likelihood, particularly irritating for Lancashire supporters that Andrew Flintoff and James Anderson were free to participate in the media event: if it had not been for the strictures of the ECB, both players would have available to strengthen Stuart Law’s line-up.

Manager Mike Watkinson probably has little time for such hypothetical fancies. The tough-minded Boltonian accepted sometime ago that Flintoff and Anderson are not available to him this week, and he learned on Monday that Sajid Mahmood had not recovered sufficiently from a side strain to be considered for the match at the County Ground.

Watkinson has therefore selected a 13-man squad which includes both the newly-contracted professional Steven Cheetham, and the veteran batsman Mal Loye, who is a direct replacement for Francois du Plessis, and can probably think of no better way to celebrate his 36th birthday on Saturday than by making a few runs.

For the summer of 2008 has been a torture for Lancashire’s beneficiary.

Loye has scored just 103 runs in 13 innings and supporters were pleading the cases of both Gareth Cross and Steven Mullaney at Aigburth last week. No one suggested Lou Vincent though.

As for Cheetham, the Oldham seamer has impressed some shrewd judges this season but seems unlikely to get the nod ahead of the seamers who bowled so well in the vital win at Liverpool, while Stephen Parry probably has another four days’ practice in carrying drinks and taking out replacement gloves ahead of him.

At least the need for someone to perform that latter task this afternoon will mean that Lancashire’s batsmen have been in the middle long enough to build up a sweat and inch their team towards the points they need to be safe. It is going to be a tense few days.

Lancashire squad v Somerset : Law (capt), Brown, Chapple, Cheetham, Chilton, Croft, Horton, Keedy, Loye, Newby, Parry, Smith, Sutton.

LV County Championship Division One: Nottinghamshire: played 15, pts 178 ; Somerset : 15, 170 ; Durham 15, 168 ; Hampshire 15, 160 ; Lancashire 15, 152 ; Kent 15, 151; Sussex: 15, 151; Yorkshire 15, 147 ; Surrey 16, 124