MARK Pettini has pledged to remain with Essex for the remainder of his cricketing career after signing a new two-year contract at the Ford County Ground.

The county captain led the county to Friends Provident Trophy success and promotion from NatWest Pro40 Division Two in 2008.

The 25-year-old, who lives in East Hanningfield, has been rewarded with a new deal that will keep him at Chelmsford until the end of the 2011 season.

And Pettini has told the Echo that he has no ambition to play his cricket anywhere else.

“It’s pleasing to have secured my long-term future, but the major thing for me is that it is with Essex and this is the only place I’ve ever wanted to play cricket,” he said.

“During the season it was difficult to sort out because I didn’t want it to be a distraction from the cricket, so it was best to leave it until the end of the summer.

“I want to spend my whole cricketing career with Essex. I would be more than happy to do that. It’s the club that I am captain of and, for that reason, I feel even closer to the county and to the club than I did before.

“Signing a long-term contract is something I really wanted to do.”

Pettini’s batting form, which he struggled for in 2007 after unexpectedly taking over the captaincy from the injured Ronnie Irani midway through the season, also improved this summer.

The former Cardiff University student hit match-winning centuries in the Friends Provident Trophy group stage victories at Kent and Surrey before hitting a purple patch of eight fifties in 17 innings late in the season.

Pettini also made 856 first-class runs at an average of 37.21 – a marked improvement on the previous year.

With his new contract now signed, he is now preparing to leave for Australia – where he spent 10 years as a child while his astronomer father Max worked at a Sydney university – at the end of the month.

There, he will spend time fishing at the remote Melville Island Fishing Lodge, 100km from Darwin in the Northern Territory, before flying to Perth in December to begin his pre-season preparations.

“One of the things about being a cricketer is that you have seven months of your year mapped out for you,” he explained.

“It’s very predictable. You have your pre-season where you are pracitsing and getting fit, then your summer is all sorted in terms of matches and other commitments.

“For that reason, I’ve really enjoyed my time since the end of the season and I intend to get away from it all for the next couple of months.

“I’ve spent some time with my family, who I hardly saw over the summer, and now I’m looking forward to heading off to Australia on my own, which is something I like to do.

“Obviously Australia is cricket-mad, but I'll be trying to get away from the game as much as possible. I’ll be keeping tabs on how my housemate Alastair Cook does with England, but I want to keep away from cricket as much as I can.”