AT SOME point today national selector Geoff Miller will announce England’s touring party to India and also the National Performance Programme squad.
Paul Horton doesn’t expect his name to be mentioned. The Lancashire opener plans to spend the next five months playing grade cricket in Perth and leaves for Australia on Friday. He may be indulging in a little bit of protective pessimism of course – he has been mentioned in the England selectors’ meetings this summer – but his response to questions about the Lord’s press conference is still, as ever, very straightforward.
“I don’t think I’ll be involved,” he said. “So I’ll be heading off to play for Gosnells in Perth where I’ll work on my game, do some training and come back a better player hopefully.”
Lancashire fans may respond that Horton is a pretty decent cricketer already. In a season when the Old Trafford batting has been notoriously brittle, the 26-year-old has scored 966 Championship runs at an average of exactly 42. That tally is not quite up to the 1,034 at 49.2 he managed in 2007, but it certainly puts to rest any ideas that he was going to suffer second season syndrome, an idea for which he expressed courteous contempt in April.
Horton has also passed 50 nine times in 25 innings and has gone on to make a couple of hundreds. Even if there hasn’t been much competition for the accolade, he has been Lancashire’s best batsman.
On Saturday he made a polished 58 as Lancashire completed an impressive eight-wicket defeat of Somerset, and afterwards he reflected on a summer of sharp contrasts.
“It’s been an up and down season , but personally I’ve enjoyed it yet again.” he began. “It’s a shame I didn’t get over a thousand runs in the Championship but missing two matches means missing four innings. I didn’t play in some of the one-day cricket and Twenty20 games, and then I didn’t get a bat for four weeks because of the weather.”
Horton has felt the impact of other disruptions too, most notably the departures of Dominic Cork and Simon Marshall, and the retirement of Iain Sutcliffe.
“It’s hard when you have contract meetings at the end of June and people getting released and blokes retiring,” he said. “They’re things that don’t happen every year.
“You have big members of your squad that leave or retire from the game and I think that’s been tough.”
So for Lancashire to finish the season with a couple of fine victories which earned them fifth place in Division One, and to do so with a side containing a large group of young home-grown players are sources of satisfaction for Horton.
“We’ve ended on a high,” he said. “It’s amazing what you can do if you get some nice weather and some performances. Also, we’ve fielded an up-and-coming side at Liverpool and Taunton. If that side’s given a chance, who knows where it can go?”
But Horton is also pleased for Mark Chilton and Mal Loye, two experienced batsmen who’ve suffered from slumps in form this summer, but who finished the campaign with fine innings against Somerset.
“I’m really pleased for Chilly,” he said. “He’s gone through a lot and it shows his character to come back from that. He’s playing the best I’ve ever seen him play at the moment. Mal’s the same. He’s a model professional, a cricketer whom I admire a great deal. Look at the time when we didn’t have Mal firing this year and look where we ended up.”
The return of such players to the side, added to the emergence of exciting talents like Karl Brown, helps Horton to fulfil his role in the team. “I’ve learned that consistency is key,” he said “My job is to affect games with the way I play and that’s what I’ve tried to learn.”
