Adam Lyth is an opening batsman in the modern mould - happy to attack the new ball with an array of shots. His real breakthrough season came in 2010 as he jumped out of the starting blocks, scoring so heavily there were thoughts he could reach 1000 Championship runs before the end of May. He narrowly missed out but soon made his first Roses hundred, off 122 balls, as his standing continued to rise.

International call-up may still be a while away but Lyth has long been marked down as a player of genuine potential. He made his first-team debut for Yorkshire aged 19 in a Pro40 match against Hampshire 2006 and a first-class debut the next season. In 2008 his 645 runs in 14 games was enough to earn him a him a three-year deal with Yorkshire and a place playing grade cricket in Adelaide as part of the ECB's Scholarship Programme. What should have been a solid follow-up season in 2009 was thrown into uncertainty as he was shafted up and down the order and in and out the side due to Michael Vaughan's campaign to win an England call-up before the Ashes. He only played four Championship games and averaged a lowly 31.42.

The winter's break and a new regime at Yorkshire, under Andrew Gale, clearly invigorated Lyth but the challenge of maintaining the standards he set in 2010 proved a difficult one. After his 1,509 first-class runs in 2010 he lost his place in 2011 after scoring only 553 runs from 11 matches.

He continued to find runs hard to come by in 2012, at least initially, advancing the suspicion that for all his exhilarating strokeplay, he suffered too many soft dismissals. But then, almost out of the blue, at Leicester in July, he not only completed his first first-class century for more than two year but turned it into his first double hundred, ending on 248 not out. It was the highest score by any Yorkshire batsman to carry his bat through an innings in the county's history. He finished the season on a high note with four consecutive half-centuries.

ESPNcricinfo - January 2013