BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, (CMC) -West Indies will be looking to win the seventh and final One-day International cricket match and regain some lost prestige against England today at Kensington Oval.
Brian Lara's side lead the weather-affected seven-match series 2-1, after successfully chasing totals of just over 280 twice over the past weekend in St Lucia.
England won the opener in Guyana and three others (two in Trinidad and one in Grenada) ended in no-results because of rain.
“We knew from the time the matches in Trinidad and Grenada were washed out, we had to win the remaining three to win this series,” West Indies captain Brian Lara told reporters at the pre-match news conference yesterday.
“We have completed two-thirds of the job and we are looking forward to the match. It is very important that we continue improving. We had a good weekend in St Lucia, but improvement is still needed for us to make sure and win this last match.
“England, obviously, will be looking to do the same and we have got to be able to get on top of them all the way.”
West Indies have boosted their attack by including fast bowler Tino Best, who took 12 wickets in the preceding Test series, but has yet to make his ODI debut, in a squad of 12 from which the final 11 will be selected for the match.
“We need some more firepower in our attack,” Lara conceded. “In the first 15 overs in the matches in St Lucia, we saw guys using their feet to our new ball bowlers.
“Someone with a little extra pace could change this, but I still think the guys that bowled did a tremendous job in St Lucia. The pitches looked like they could yield over 300 runs and we limited England to 280, so credit must go them and they deserve to be selected again today.”
A month ago, England clinched a historic Test series triumph with victory over West Indies in Barbados.
The visitors have never won an ODI series on Caribbean soil and will have to wait for that piece of history on another trip, but they can at least share the series with victory here.
“We have played well all winter in the Test matches, won the Test series in the Caribbean 3-0, and everything went well,” remarked England all-rounder Andrew Flintoff at a pre-match news conference yesterday.
“As a team, it is important that we do not lose this ODI series because we played a lot of good ODI last summer and we want to keep improving.
“As a team, we can learn from the two matches in St Lucia. In the last few overs of our innings and their innings, we have not played too well. If we can learn from these experiences and improve; we can get better.”
England have looked far more vulnerable in the ODI series than they did in the Test series. Their batting has lacked the experience to take advantage of West Indies’ bowling at the death and, on the flatter pitches, their bowling has been less menacing.
Squads:
WEST INDIES (from): Brian Lara (captain), Ramnaresh Sarwan (vice-captain), Tino Best, Ian Bradshaw, Dwayne Bravo, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Mervyn Dillon, Chris Gayle, Ridley Jacobs, Ricardo Powell, Ravi Rampaul, Dwayne Smith.
ENGLAND (from): Michael Vaughan (captain), Marcus Trescothick (vice-captain), James Anderson, Gareth Batty, Ian Blackwell, Rikki Clarke, Paul Collingwood, Andrew Flintoff, Ashley Giles, Darren Gough, Stephen Harmison, James Kirtley, Anthony McGrath, Chris Read, Andrew Strauss.