The Lancashire leg-spinner is focusing on improving his batting and fielding in order to force his way into the red-ball team after spending another off-season carrying drinks
Leg-spinner Matt Parkinson is not giving up on forcing his way into England's Test team despite again being overlooked for a debut in Australia and the West Indies.
Since his maiden call up for the New Zealand series in 2019, the 25-year-old has been a regular feature of touring squads.
But his role has been limited to carrying drinks and bowling in the practice nets, as his wait for an international red-ball outing goes on.
"I’m still confident," he said. "But it’s tough to keep getting up for trips if you’re not involved again.
"I might not be involved again until the winter. I say bye to the lads and don’t see them again until October.
"It is tough and you feel a long way away. But the thing I can control is my performances for Lancashire. That’s enough for me.
"It’s enough for me to perform and win games for Lancashire. I love playing here. If that’s my lot, so be it. It’s fantastic. I’m content with where I’m at.
"If a Test cap comes, fantastic, brilliant. If it doesn’t, I’ve got enough here at Lancashire to have a good career."
Parkinson is yet to receive specific feedback over what it will take to leapfrog current No.1 spinner Jack Leach, but his focus is on improving his batting the fielding to become a more three-dimensional cricketer.
Bar a rain-affected intra-squad game, Parkinson's last competitive outing came at the end of last season (Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
And in the bowling department, adding pace - something cited as a major drawback by some onlookers - is among his priorities.
"I always have done (worked on batting and fielding), but it’s just becoming more apparent that it’s a way into the side - to not be a No.11, be a No.9," he admitted. "Don’t be the worst fielder, be part of the pack.
"It’s all a continuous process that I’ve been doing since I was 17-years-old.
"It’s not going to be an overnight thing, and I may never get there, but that’s when I have to take my bowling to a new level.
On his bowling, Parkinson added: "A bit of everything. It’s not just one thing. I’m trying to get my top speed up. I think I have got a bit quicker, but I’m trying to take that to the next level.
"Googlies, sliders, etc. It’s not one thing where I’m thinking, ‘If I do this, I will play for England’. It’s the whole package.
"It’s nothing technical. It’s me just thinking that I need to be the best cricketer I can be."
Even England Lions couldn't find a place for the Bolton spinner, omitting him for the one-off Test against Australia A as Dom Bess got the nod.
His sole outing since the end of the last LV= Insurance County Championship season came in an intra-squad pre-Ashes warm-up match which saw two days lost to rain and only 29 overs bowled.
"I didn’t play at all and wasn’t close to playing. I genuinely don’t think they knew what I did. It was just 12 days in a hotel room and then I came home."
"That was frustrating," he admitted. "The weather didn’t help. It rained non-stop for two weeks. The prep wasn’t ideal on the Gold Coast.
"It’s a tough thing because they went in with the best of intentions. 30 players or whatever it was - Lions and the Ashes squad side by side. I just think things went wrong in the logistics of that trip.
"There were probably too many people out there, facilities weren’t great.
"When we came to play the Lions game, I didn’t get selected. They brought Bessy back in.
"I don’t think the weather helped, I don’t think facilities helped, and I also don’t think we helped the Ashes prep with those extra bodies really.
"I think they’d say the same thing. I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn.
"I don’t think the Lions lads got the trip they wanted.
"It was frustrating that I was the only Lions player who didn’t play. It kind of sums up my England career so far.
"It was frustrating because it’s the only trip where I’ve gone and felt not that I didn’t get anything out of it, but borderline I didn’t get much out of it. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong."
Even Parkinson's white-ball England career is on the rocks (Daniel Leal/Getty Images)
It wasn't just the red-ball game that provided disappointment for Parkinson. His last white-ball outing for England now stretched back to last July, after he was left out of the T20 World Cup squad and the five-match series against West Indies.
And to compound an inactive winter, he went to the Pakistan Super League with Peshawar Zalmi as a replacement for fellow-Lancastrian Saqib Mahmood, only to be left wondering why he was there.
He explained: "I don’t they knew I played cricket to be honest!
"I didn’t play at all and wasn’t close to playing. I genuinely don’t think they knew what I did.
"It was just 12 days in a hotel room and then I came home.
"It was a frustrating trip. I went with a lot of hope and anticipation. As a replacement player, I thought I was going to play.
"But they played three overseas, left two of us out and played a local instead.
"Why bother signing me? That was frustrating on the back of Australia. Then I did the West Indies as well."
Lancashire kick off their domestic campaign against Kent at Canterbury starting on Thursday, April 14.
Parkinson wants more attention paid to conditions in the English cricket (Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
Among the topics central to the high-performance review being carried out in the wake of the 4-0 Ashes debacle will undoubtedly be the state of pitches across the domestic game.
Parkinson is unhappy with the lack of exposure given to spinners and wants the stigma around them to change.
"It’s tough because the spinners coming through now, and I’m pally with a lot of them, they’re all at clubs where you think that spinners should play every single game," he added.
"If they (the counties) wanted to, I don’t care how much it’s rained, you can produce wickets that are good and can spin.
"I’m blessed because I play at Old Trafford. It’s a good pitch, it’s flat, it spins, I’m in Division One, which I’m lucky for because a lot of those pitches are flat.
"In Division Two, teams need results and when they panic they don’t go down the spin route, they go down the green seamer route.
"You have 23-year-old seamers who have played 60 or 70 (first-class) games, but I’m almost 26 and have played 35 games.
"You have a generic county seamer who has played 60 or 70 games because he’s part of a four-man seam attack. You’re never going to improve if you’re not playing.
"It’s more of an attitude problem. I think teams need to be prepared to lose to play spinners."
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