Gazing at the covers

We walked off after day one at 293 for 3, as I said, not the best day in the field; that’s obvious. Day two was better though. We picked up the remaining seven wickets for 159 with Dan (Vettori) and Tommy (Chris Martin) both thoroughly earning their four wickets each. Dan bowled tightly throughout the innings and it was just a matter of time before he’d pick up wickets. Dan and I normally, in the past, have bowled well together, we’ve both been able to control the runs and then put scoreboard pressure on the batters to score. The ends we like to bowl from normally works that it suits us both too. I couldn’t hold up my end in the way I’ve been able to do enough in this first innings. So it took a change of ends for Dan so that he and Tommy could bowl together. And it worked, perfectly; the last four wickets for just eight runs, all of them off Muralitharan's bat. We love the way he bats, we all wish we could be that free. It’s raining right now, it’s almost 9am and we’d normally be at the ground by now.

An amazing storm came through around 5am this morning, thunder banging about and lightning as bright as I’ve ever seen; with it, torrential rain. The rain has eased but is still steady and doesn’t look like stopping anytime soon. We’ve watched the covers go on and come off, an amazing mission by the lads at the ground. The whole ground gets covered; I don’t know if there are that many covers in New Zealand, I’ve never seen anything like it. As we’ve watched them being taken off we know that it’s about a 90-minute even so there is no point going to the ground until the rain stops completely. There’s nothing we can do about it so it was a longer breakfast than normal and most of the boys will be in their room resting up some more.

Yesterday afternoon we got through to stumps two down and 87 on the board. McIntosh played a traditional Test match openers role. He blunted the bowlers and scored where he could; quite the opposite of how Dilshan played. Dilshan attacked us and put us, bowlers, on the back foot. His style comes with risk but when it comes off, and he’s good enough, it is a tough style to work plans to. The thing about the way Dilshan played, especially in a first innings is that it gives the fielding team a chance of an early wicket and some early momentum. Obviously if he comes off it’s the opposite, but as we saw yesterday we know that if we can get early breakthroughs in the top order then the tail isn’t going to add as many as some line-ups in the world.

As I type this a big black cloud has worked its way over the hotel and heading its way to the ground, the rain has just got heavier and it looks like we’ll be at the hotel for a while yet.