Day 2 at Lord's

Or rather Day 1 at Chelmsford, where I'm watching Kent struggle to deal with the controlled pace of Andre Nel, Graham Napier and Chris Wright. 120-3 off 31 overs, which is almost Test match pace rather than a 50-over game. I get all the glamorous assignments.

As this is a day-night match, I watched the morning's play from Lord's on TV and have a little set on in the corner of the Chelmsford press box, where I've been able to watch the players trudge on and off during breaks for bad light. Ryan Sidebottom was swinging the new ball a long way this morning, too far for Steve Bucknor who repeatedly turned down appeals for leg-before that did appear to be missing leg stump. Didn't stop the pained looks from Sidebottom or the pointed one at Buckner when he swung the ball past Kyle Mills's front pad to rip out his off stump.

It's hard to know how to call this game. The past four Tests there have been drawn, with England scoring more than 500 in the first innings of three of them. Yet the Ashes Test in 2005 was a low-scoring thriller and the match with India last summer featured four innings between 200 and 300. So is New Zealand's 277 all out a good score or not? How will England (68-0 overnight) find it batting on the third day or even the fifth? Will the rain and bad light let up over the weekend to allow a match to break out?

Incidentally, questions ought to be raised about Tim Ambrose's keeping in New Zealand's innings. He didn't drop any catches that I can recall, but he let 16 byes through and as a proportion of New Zealand's total runs, more than 12%, that was the eighth worst display by an England keeper (praise be to Statsguru for allowing us to work out such things). It shouldn't matter much and is hardly a hanging offence, especially as keeping is always hard at Lord's, but it is a small cause for concern.