De Silva and Anthony excel on foreign fields

Kent 369; Glamorgan 155-0.

The earth is flat, at least at the Nevill Ground where batsmen were able to tap into a seemingly bottomless well of runs without too much bother from teams of toiling bowlers. The stockpile of runs in the day made Glamorgan's overseas signing Hamish Anthony's career-best return seem all the more impressive. In fact it was quite a day for overseas players.

Aravinda de Silva, Kent's diminutive replacement for Carl Hooper, is beginning to look like a canny signing after scoring his second century of the summer in only his fifth Championship match. He may only be just over 5ft 3in but he seems bigger with a bat in his hand. He worked the on side well, with plenty of wristy pulls and drives.

There were also some delicate cuts and cover drives among the 23 boundaries of his four-hour innings, during which he shared in a fourth-wicket stand of 151 with Mark Ealham. Appropriately he fell to the best bowler, Anthony, who had him leg-before with a ball that kept low and eluded the attempted short-arm pull by the Sri Lankan Test player.

That sparked a collapse as Kent, without the services of Neil Taylor after he suffered a broken knuckle on the first day, lost their last five wickets for 27 runs. Anthony, who seemed able to extract a little bit extra out of the wicket throughout his 24 overs, was the chief architect and his reward was 5 for 70. Steve Watkin's marathon 30 overs proved reasonably economical and he finished with satisfactory figures of 2 for 98 as Glamorgan picked up maximum bowling points for the fifth match on the trot.

Then it was Kent's turn in the field, and Glamorgan's openers, Hugh Morris and Adrian Dale, made them suffer. The pair of them rode their luck and compiled a substantial 155-run stand, on the way helping themselves to sixes by happily hooking Martin McCague. Morris could have been back in the pavilion well before the end but fortunately for him the luckless McCague was unable to hang on to an awkward chance at second slip when the Glamorgan captain was on 41.

They thought they had him again 17 runs later but when their frantic appeals for a catch behind off Min Patel were ignored by umpire Alan Jones, Kent faces were as long as the early evening shadows.

A premature crowd invasion with an over to go livened the closing moments. It was an understandable mistake by the hordes of youngsters, since the ailing clock would not have helped them since it is losing eight minutes an hour. Much more and time will stand still in Royal Tunbridge Wells.