ANTHONY McGRATH has urged England to stick with Adam Lyth through this summer’s Ashes series as the Yorkshire opener prepares to make his second Test appearance against New Zealand at Headingley today.

Lyth will open with Alastair Cook after last week’s debut at Lord’s saw him score seven and 12.

The 27-year-old scored 1,400 runs in the Championship last season on the way to Yorkshire winning the title, and he was the obvious choice to partner Cook for last month’s series in the West Indies.

England chose Jonathan Trott, who struggled in the Caribbean and has since retired from international cricket, finally opening the door to the left-hander from Whitby.

“Ideally, you want a good start to take the pressure off because you’re always going to have that scrutiny on you in international cricket,” said McGrath, Yorkshire’s batting consultant who played Test and one-day cricket for England in 2003/04.

“But I just hope they give him the full summer because it makes no sense to me to pick someone and just give them a couple of Tests.

“There’s a new coach coming in in Trevor Bayliss, and he might have some new ideas. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see on that.

“But I just hope they say to him ‘here you are, here’s seven Tests. We’ve picked you because you’ve been consistent for the last two years in county cricket, and we’re going to back you’.

“I don’t think we do that enough in this country to identify a player. I think we can even have too many players to pick from to an extent.

“If you look at New Zealand with Guptill, McCullum, even Kane Williamson, I think his first 15 or so Tests only averaged 20. But they stick with these players probably because they don’t have the pool of players.

“It gives the selected ones a chance to gain experience and learn.”

McGrath says it is “fair” to suggest that the best way of dealing with Lyth would be to not go down the route England took with his own international career, which amounted to only four Tests and 14 one-day internationals.

“There’s a number of players in that bracket in the last ten to 20 years,” he added.

“There are far too many players who have come in and just had a couple of Tests and they’ve gone, which is very difficult for the individual.

“Ian Bell is one they stuck with. He didn’t have the best of Ashes series when we won it in 2005, but that experience of being around the environment has stood him in good stead. And look at him now.”