Darren Stevens said that nothing much happened for an hour, but then the ball started moving all over the place - that was the impression I got when I watched about twenty minutes play from about midday onwards, he was beating the bat three or four times an over and when I heard that Glamorgan had made it to lunch without losing a wicket, albeit at a very slow run rate, I thought they had done superbly. I then watched about half an hour of the Kent reply and thought that conditions may have eased a little because, although the bat was still being beaten pretty regularly, the ball was also locating the middle of the bat a lot more than it had been.

As others have said, it's been a strange start to the season - you expect seamers to prosper at this time of the year, but it's been ridiculous this season. As for an explanation, I'd say there are three possible ones - dodgy pitches, high quality bowling and poor batting. Probably the truth is that there has been something of a mixture of those three, but I'd put the last named as the major cause of it - pundits always talk about test matches and four day games "moving forward quickly" these days, but what they really mean is that more wickets have fallen than the bowling and conditions would indicate because so many batsman these days see flashy twenty somethings before they are dismissed having a swish as being acceptable somehow.