THE dust has hardly begun to settle on the 2008 cricket season but Mike Watkinson is already planning for next summer. The Lancashire manager was delighted with the way his players battled for their vital victories over Kent and Somerset and now wants that toughness to reinforce a title challenge in 12 months’ time.

“Scrapping was needed,” said Watkinson. “One of the things I said was ‘Don’t worry how it looks’. You can’t play a textbook knock on some of the wickets we’ve played on.

“You’ve got to go out there and take a few blows and beat the man you’re up against, and I think we did that. Some of the players did big jobs in the last two days against Somerset.

“We can now look at some of the things we can improve on to prevent us scrapping at the bottom and make sure we’re scrapping at the top next year.”

And having brought a number of newer faces into the side over the last month, Watkinson was also pleased with the response of those cricketers, some of whom have only a handful of first team appearances on their CV.

“There’s been a need to freshen up our side with younger players,” he said. “Against Somerset they stood up to the challenge and the pressure. It was summed up for me by Karl Brown who was given a lot of verbals by Andy Caddick and responded by patting the pitch down and then clonking him for four. That’s a great memory to take from the last match.”

And so to the future. Despite the growth of the IPL and the vastly increased financial rewards available, cricket seems unlikely to rival football as a sporting leviathan, but county managers have little time to take a break before thoughts turn to next spring.

While Watkinson’s planning is limited by the fact many of the younger members of his squad are spending the winter playing cricket overseas, he still has a heavy workload and will have a close eye on the development of Paul Horton, Stephen Parry and the rest.

“We keep close tabs on where the players are going and we make sure they get the right coaching and conditioning resources,” he explained. “Many of them have also got to grow as individuals and learn life-skills as well as cricket skills by getting away from home for six months and also having the extra pressure of having to perform in state or club cricket. I’ll be watching a lot of cricket from Melbourne on the internet.”

At Old Trafford, the manager will also be ensuring that the players who stay at home have medical screenings and fitness programmes set up for them. At the same time he will be scouring the cricket world in an attempt to find Lancashire’s overseas signing for 2009.

“All the international cricket taking place in the world is tying up a lot of overseas players,” he said. “Next season the IPL and the Twenty20 World Cup will mean that talented cricketers are in short supply.”

Nonetheless, Watkinson is certainly relishing those challenges far more now that Lancashire have secured their First Division status in 2009. “Let’s get through this winter and look to another challenge next summer,” he said.