ADAM LYTH has pointed to both technical and mindset changes as the main reasons behind his fabulous start to the new county season.

The Yorkshire opener has altered his trigger movements at the crease and has also taken a freer approach to his batting as he closes in on 500 runs in the LV= Insurance County Championship.

Left-handed Lyth is only 12 runs away from a mark he hopes to pass when Northamptonshire visit Emerald Headingley in the fourth round of Group Three fixtures on Thursday.

In Championship cricket in 2021, he has posted scores of 52, 115 not out, 97, 116, 42 and 66. Furthermore, in two friendly innings, he recorded scores of 52 and 50.

His haul of 488 means he is the highest English run-scorer in the country this summer.

And he has helped Yorkshire to two wins and a draw from their opening Group Three games.

Lyth’s changes are more a return to previous ways rather than developing something new, and he worked hard on it during a winter spell of T10 and T20 cricket in Abu Dhabi and Pakistan in January and February.

“When I went away on that white ball tour, I knew I wasn’t going to play much,” he said.

“So I kind of did a bit of work on my red ball game, although it was with the white ball.

“It was just making my trigger movements a lot smaller, going back to my old movements.”

In a first-class career which has spanned the last 14 years and brought him 11,274 runs, Lyth enjoyed two standout domestic seasons in particular.

In 2010, he scored 1,509 first-class runs, including three hundreds. And in 2014, he bettered that with 1,609 runs, including seven hundreds.

“I feel like I’m hitting the ball as well as those two seasons,” he said.

“It’s a shame it’s taken me that long to go back to that, but I feel I can play freely all around the ground off front and back foot, especially hitting down the ground a lot more. I also feel I can get into my drive a lot more, which is probably my strongest shot.”