Prince: "Relegation hurt last season and we wanted to fix that."

Ashwell Prince is, arguably, in the form of his life. The South-African veteran batsman has already accumulated 1,050 runs at an average of 70.00 in four-day cricket, a vital contribution to Lancashire’s success in Division Two of the County Championship.

Prince has also scored more runs than anyone else since the start of the 2014 campaign (2,210) and his deadly form shows no signs of wavering even in the latter stages of his playing career at the age of 38.

The question on the lips of every Lancashire fan this year has been whether Prince would stay at Old Trafford for another season. The left-handed batsman has already reversed his decision to retire after the Red Rose were relegated last year and the enticing prospect of top-flight cricket could lure Prince for one more season.

When questioned as to whether any firm decision had been made about his Lancashire future, Prince laughed and said: “Not at the moment. Our first goal is to try and get promotion, hopefully we can secure that within the next few games and kick on and try and win the division.”

The South-African was the first batsmen to reach over 1,000 runs this season in Lancashire’s last four-day match at home to Northamptonshire, a fixture which also saw Prince achieve another personal milestone, as he advanced to 18,000 first-class career runs.

Prince said: “It [my batting] has been going good so far this season and hopefully it will continue for the rest of the season. I enjoy batting at Old Trafford that’s for sure. I think in the country it is one of the best pitches and whenever you play a game at Old Trafford there is something in it for everybody. No matter what skill you have, you are in the game.

“I am really enjoying my batting. If you can average around 100 runs per game then that is a decent contribution. Having said that, you don’t always get to bat twice in a match, in a lot of games this season we have only managed to bat once.

Prince celebrates his double-hundred against Derbyshire earlier this season.

“But if I can finish off the season, having contributed 100 runs per game, that would mean 1,600 for the season. That is a long way away, but given the opportunity I will try and get as close to 1,600 as I can, but I will have to take it one game at a time.”

Although suggestions had been made about Prince reversing his decision to retire at the end of 2014, no firm decision had been made by the final fixture against Middlesex at Old Trafford, the match which resigned Lancashire to successive relegations from the first division.

Prince later sighted Lancashire’s relegation as an important reason for his decision to stay at the club for another season and perhaps it is this which has also inspired Prince to perform as well as he has for Lancashire across the board in 2015.

He said: “If we were in the first division I would give the same. My commitment to the club has always been to give the same. I think you are right that relegation hurt last season and as a group we wanted to fix that and we wanted to resurrect the situation.

“I feel that a club of this magnitude deserves to be in the first division, having said that nobody deserves by right or by how wealthy the club is, or by how many stars you have on paper. Everybody plays to be in the first division by what they do on the pitch,” he added.

The 2014 season saw Prince achieve a career-best 257 not out against Northamptonshire and he recorded the third double-hundred of his career at Southport this season to guide Lancashire to an innings victory against Derbyshire.

Prince said: “As far as my personal form is concerned, I have had four full seasons at Lancashire and every season I have passed 1,000 runs. As far as my own goals are concerned, those are the type of things that you set out to do at the start of the season.

Prince has scored more runs than anyone else since the start of the 2014 season.

“I am satisfied to know that, even towards the end of my career, I can still produce those kinds of results. So far this season the guys have shown what they can do on the pitch and hopefully next season the boys will be able to challenge for the first division title,” he added.

Prince’s form has by no means been contained to red-ball cricket. In fact, the veteran batsman has achieved a career-bestscore of 78 against Durham this season with an overall return of 318 runs, making him the leading run-scorer at Lancashire in the shortest format of the game.

A determined fifty at Durham in the reverse fixture made amends for the defeat suffered on home soil, before Prince thumped 59 off only 30 balls against Yorkshire to guide the Lightning to their highest ever Twenty20 score of 231/4 at Old Trafford in front of a sell-out crowd.

However, Prince admits that it took a while for him to adopt Twenty20 cricket and he admits that he is better suited to longer formats of the game.

Prince said: “I think as someone who is predominantly a Test player, that it took me a little while to buy into Twenty20. I think of late I am probably enjoying it a little bit more and approaching it with an open mind.

“I understand that my strengths are probably more suited to the longer format of the game.  When I go out to bat in a Twenty20, all I am trying to do is make a contribution because I know if I can get the team off to a good start we’ve got the players coming in later on who can do real damage, he added.”

Lancashire were beaten by the narrow margin of four runs at Edgbaston last year by the Birmingham Bears and Prince admits that the Lightning would love another opportunity to appear at what would be their sixth Final’s Day.

He said: “The boys would love another chance to go to Final’s Day, having said that so would every other county in the country. We are sitting in fourth position at the moment, which is a qualifying spot and even though it has been topsy turvy season in the Twenty20 format, it is still in our hands and we can still qualify, maybe in second place.

Prince is Lancashire's leading run-scorer in Twenty20 cricket this season.

“Qualification is still in our hands and that is the best way to have it. If we win two out of the next four games we probably will secure a spot and maybe if we win three of the next four games we might even be able to secure a home quarter-final. It is all to play for and we look forward to those games.”

Lancashire may well have secured a spot in the quarter-finals already, but a run of three defeats in four matches saw Ashley Giles’s side edged out by narrow margins in all three defeats suffered and Prince acknowledged that those defeats can hurt far more than comfortable thrashings.

He said: “When you lose the tight games you go to bed at night and you can’t sleep. You are thinking of two runs that you could have stopped in the field or one or two runs that you could have run harder when you were batting. But that is the nature of Twenty20.

“These days almost every game goes down to the wire with the quality of pitches and capabilities of players to chase down anything up to 15 runs per over,” he added.

Lancashire’s next Twenty20 fixture is a trip to Grace Road where they take on the Leicestershire Foxes in a must-win game if they are to secure a spot in the knockout stages and progress to Final’s Day.