Cricket: Red Rose already back training hard for next season’s challenge

Dec 5 2007 by Our Correspondent, Liverpool Daily Post

THE old county pros would never have believed it. Just 73 days after the last match of the 2007 season ended in crushing disappointment at the Oval Lancashire’s cricketers returned to work yesterday with a two-hour fitness session at Rivington Pike.

Led by fitness coach Alex Horn and manager Mike Watkinson, the players pounded woodland paths and sprinted up terraces as they sought to build both team spirit and endurance in advance of a competitive campaign which does not begin until April 16 when the Old Trafford side visit Surrey – again.

Even the pre-season trip to the United Arab Emirates is more than three months away but Watkinson agreed that the players’ year began at Rivington and made no apology for the early start.

“Some of the younger ones have even been in the gym in their two months off after the end of the season but that work is carefully monitored,” he said. “We’ve had an excellent session this morning and we’ll be going to the velodrome and doing some indoor climbing in the next few weeks.”

The sight of Lancashire’s cricketers preparing for summer before some people have even put up their Christmas decorations certainly surprised the intrepid hikers and lycra-clad cyclists who thronged the visitors’ centre and cafe.

“But when’s their next match?” asked one of them. For a moment you could see his point.

However, Alex Horn knows the importance of long-term properly organised training and its additional value in building team-spirit and the former Aberdeen FC fitness expert has developed tailored programmes for players he praised “as a joy to work with”.

“In the New Year we’ll begin to do more cricket-centred work,” added Watkinson. “Each of the players has DVDs showing his performances and they have laptops on which they can analyse their play and see areas in which they need to improve. They are a very well-focused group of cricketers.”

And Watkinson, who made his first-class debut for Lancashire in 1982, also acknowledged that the careful procedures followed by the modern cricketer were a far cry from the regime he used in his time as a Lancashire professional.

“In the off-season I went back to work as an engineer” he recalled.

“We trained two nights a week. One evening we’d be running round Chorlton and in the next we’d be in the freezing sheds practising our cricket.”

The idea of anyone even aiming to take 1,000 Test wickets was also a distinctly fanciful idea in the 1980s but the Lancashire manager was also keen to pay tribute to Muttiah Muralitharan who broke Shane Warne’s record in Kandy on Monday.

“It’s an fantastic achievement for a tremendous cricketer and a great bloke,” he said. “Murali will probably talk us through each of his wickets when we see him again.”