KEY POINTS:
The second test is nicely balanced after the first day but New Zealand have a wonderful chance to get right on top of the West Indies when play resumes today.
It was a decent day's work from the Black Caps yesterday without being spectacular. I thought Daniel Vettori kept a fine balance between attack and defence, which is always important on the first day. I think they would be pretty pleased - they couldn't have hoped for a better outcome after losing the toss.
The teams have been presented with a flat deck in Napier and I would think that the side batting first would regard about 350 as par. Anything less than that, and you are going to find yourself in trouble later in the test. If New Zealand could bowl the Windies out for a score not much over 300, they will be doing handstands because it is a good deck.
So the partnership that resumes this morning, between the West Indies constant batting star Shivnarine Chanderpaul and the first-test hero Jerome Taylor, is absolutely critical.
If New Zealand can get the early breakthrough, and follow that up with another quick wicket, they will be in a terrific position. But if this partnership takes hold, the game could easily start to swing back the West Indies' way.
Given Chanderpaul's wonderful form of late, the tactics are fairly straightforward. Every batsman is vulnerable early on so he can be attacked in the first 20 minutes or so. But from there on, it will be a case of defending against Chanderpaul, keeping him away from the strike as much as possible, and attacking the other end. As for Taylor, I don't think the first test century was a one-off, even though it was by far his best innings in top-class cricket. He looks capable to me of scoring a few runs at test level.
Two encouraging points from the first day were the way New Zealand operated as a unit, and the top-class catching.
Vettori sees himself as the main wicket-taking option and is then looking to put the best supporting attack around himself. He hasn't quite got the players he wants - the captain clearly rates Chris Martin as a wicket taker and above Kyle Mills and Mark Gillespie but the selectors have opted to leave Martin out of the side.
It is fair to say that Martin's main problem is when he comes back for his second and third spells but there are two schools of thought about how to get a player back into form and fitness.
The option I favour is to leave him in the test arena because a couple of good weeks can quickly turn the situation around. The other way, of sending him back to first-class cricket, can take a long time - perhaps six months or more.
In New Zealand's case, we don't have a surplus of test class players anyway.
One of the players who has really stepped up for Vettori, though, is Iain O'Brien and the captain has a lot of faith in him. He's an unfashionable type of player, but has come from a long way back in the pack to establish himself and he keeps rewarding the faith shown in him.
