Weekend Interview: Yorkshire’s Adam Lyth plans to remove the shackles and regain England Test place

DEPENDING on which way you look at it, there has never been a worse or better time to be an opening batsman in county cricket.

On the one hand, it is no fun facing the new ball beneath cloudy skies in Arctic April or shivering September, when most County Championship games are now normally played.

On the other, anyone who prospers at the start of the coming season – one with a better spread of Championship matches throughout the summer to avoid a clash with the World Cup – knows they could easily propel themselves into an England Test team crying out for consistent batsmen and openers in particular.

One man who realises this as much as anybody is Adam Lyth, the Yorkshire left-hander.

Four years ago, Lyth opened in seven Tests before becoming one of the many players tried, tested and ultimately thrown to one side after the retirement of previous incumbent Andrew Strauss.

Including Sir Alastair Cook (himself now retired from international cricket), England have used 15 openers at Test level in the six-and-a-half years since Strauss’s departure.

If that suggests they do not have much of a clue who should be opening, it would hardly be an egregious slight on those who have chosen, in chronological sequence, Messrs Compton, Root, Carberry, Robson, Trott, Lyth, Moeen, Hales, Duckett, Hameed, Jennings, Stoneman, Burns and Denly, a list so extensive that not even Don Juan’s little black book contained quite so many names.