Mike Watkinson backs Paul Horton to overcome late season dip

Nov 24 2008 by Paul Edwards, Liverpool Daily Post

MIKE WATKINSON believes Paul Horton’s dip in form in the second half of the 2008 season was caused partly by being named as a contender for a place on England’s winter tours.

The Sefton Park opener scored 661 runs (13 innings) in the first eight Championship games but only 305 (12 innings) in the next eight, and the Lancashire manager feels that Horton should now focus simply on batting well and let representative honours take care of themselves.

“If Paul had one blip this year it was when people started to talk about national squads, emerging player programmes and all the rest of it,” he said. “All of a sudden he may have thought ‘I could be in the Lions squad here’ and that wasn’t the way to go because you lose your focus on what you’re doing.

“What he’s done well in his career is to focus on small stages, but get ahead of yourself and you lose it on a daily basis. The selectors will talk about him because he’s qualified to play for England and he’s scored 2,000 runs in the last two seasons.

“If you look to repeat that, bigger rewards will come. But if you look for bigger rewards, you’ll fail to repeat that.”

Watkinson’s comments are interesting because the Lancashire manager is understandably reluctant to criticise any of his players publicly and he therefore believes that Horton is strong enough to cope with a measure of carefully targeted advice. But the manager also added a generous tribute to Horton’s progress from squad member to being one of the first names on the team sheet in less than two years.

“Paul’s been fantastic for us,” said Watkinson. “He has an inner strength and he does have determination. He probably has an agenda which he doesn’t show to people, which I think a lot of successful people have. Some of the things you want to achieve you’ve got to keep as private targets, but you’ve got to keep them realistic and achievable.”

Horton is enjoying a successful winter playing for and captaining the Perth first-grade side, Gosnells.