NOT for nothing is it known as the Brit Oval. This may well prove to be the only county match played all season by two teams without either a Kolpak or an official overseas player. Twenty-one of the cricketers involved are qualified for England, 11 of them from Wales, and the 22nd, Mohammad Akram, one of the Surrey bowlers under scrutiny at present, is qualified for county cricket by residence.

He was not required to bowl or bat yesterday. While Surrey’s report on the balltampering incidents last Friday was being prepared for onward transmission to the ECB tomorrow, their batsmen were putting Glamorgan’s depleted bowling attack to the sword. Who, however, would be a bowler at the Oval on days such as this, when the outfield is like an ice rink and the pitch is to one side of the largest and flattest square in the land, perhaps the world? The boundary on the Harleyford Road side was 58 yards at its nearest point, only a little longer than the one on the Gasholder side when Alistair Brown made his famous 268 in the Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy match against Glamorgan three years ago.

Yesterday Glamorgan actually took two wickets with the new ball, but by the time they left the field, wan and weary, Brown had hit a typically blistering hundred in the wake of a relatively sedate one by Scott Newman and a commanding 84 by Rikki Clarke. All of them made batting look more or less a cakewalk and in truth, except when David Harrison was managing to get some bounce and deviation with the hard ball at either end of the day, it was.

Without their only overseas player, Matthew Elliott, who is suffering from back spasms, and with Matthew Maynard, Alex Wharf and Simon Jones already ruled out and Darren Thomas pulling a groin muscle after three balls, Glamorgan are exposed to the possibility of a second defeat by Surrey in a fortnight. Such is the trueness of the pitch, however, that they should not be picked off by Surrey’s bowlers as easily as the home batsmen gathered their runs yesterday. It was like selecting apples from a tree laden with fruit.

Harrison postponed the harvest with some good, direct fast bowling in the first hour. Richard Clinton nicked a ball that left him from just short of a length and Mark Ramprakash for once showed a bowler some charity, cutting on to his stumps when the bounce was higher than he expected. But Newman and Clarke plundered 185 in 47 overs before Clarke was given out caught behind, wafting, and departed gracelessly. Brown’s 37th first-class hundred took him 95 balls. Leg -before, working to leg, he had hit two of the day’s four sixes and 21 of the 65 fours.

• The England selectors, meeting tomorrow to pick their team for the first Test against Bangladesh next week, had little relief from the malaise affecting all but two of the main batting contenders yesterday:

  Michael Vaughan (batting average this season, 12): still to bat v Leicestershire
  Marcus Trescothick (av 16): did not play v Scotland Andrew Strauss (av 15.5): 27 v Gloucestershire
  Kevin Pietersen (av 18): 1 v Kent
  Ian Bell (av 60): 1 v Sussex
  Robert Key (av 36.8): 20 v Hampshire
  Andrew Flintoff (av 25): 12 v Durham

  INJURED PLAYERS: Graham Thorpe (av 15.6): unfit for Surrey: sore back; Ashley Giles: unfit to bowl v Sussex: scan on hip; Simon Jones: unfit for Glamorgan: scan on back