We have to bat 50 overs and put partnerships together: Simmons

West Indies have been horrible in One-Day Internationals since the 2019 World Cup, having lost 23 of their last 39 encounters. Amongst the top-10 ranked sides, the Men in Maroon have the worst winning percentage (39.4) and have lost nine of their last 13 ODI series in this time frame. And, it’s mostly because of their batting unit.

They have played out the entire 50 overs only six times in those 39 games and unsurprisingly have the worst batting average (28.2) and balls/wicket (33.8) in this time frame. They are next scheduled to play three ODIs against India, starting from Friday (July 22), and head coach Phil Simmons wants the quality of surfaces in West Indies to get better.

"The main thing is how we bat our 50 overs…we have to bat 50 overs and put our innings together and partnerships together. Somebody has to be looking to score a hundred and hold the team together. Batting-wise that is it," he said prior to the ODI series in Port-of-Spain.

"I can't look past the batters here yet. I think you judge people on good wickets. We had good performances in Netherlands and good performances in Pakistan. You come home and you get indifferent wickets where guys have to fight for runs and we agree that we should've fought a little harder, but I can't come down on them. 

“Let's see what happens. These wickets (at Queen's Park Oval) look really good and let's see how they play and we can judge them from this."

The first ODI will be played at the Queen's Park Oval which hasn't hosted an international game since August 2019. However, Simmons feels that the surface looks better and you could expect a better performance from the batting unit.

"The first difference is that the surface here (in Port-of-Spain) looks like some work has been put into it. It has been prepared and it looks good. That is all you can go to…they are true wickets that we're going to play these three games on and it looked really good the last couple of days we've been there, so [we will] wait and see how they play on Friday.

"You expect a better batting performance. I think we don't really want to make any excuses and in the last game we showed what we should've shown in the first two games…I'm not hiding the fact that they were bad cricket wickets on the whole, but I expect different here. The wicket has looked good and yes it (India) is a stronger bowling team but we expect a better batting performance."

The head coach has asked for better pitches across the region if West Indies want to produce quality batters. “You have to let them (groundstaff across the Caribbean) know (about the sub-standard pitches). 

"It's not nice, it's something that we've to work on throughout the Caribbean because the better wickets we get for our young players to grow up on, the better batsmen we get, the better fast bowlers and spinners we get. So, yes, it's a conversation we have all the time." 

West Indies were recently whitewashed in a three-match ODI series against Bangladesh and even their bowlers were way below-par as they couldn’t bundle out Tamim Iqbal and Co. even once in the series. "The bowling and the fielding has been improving daily," said Simmons.

"We rank ourselves very highly on the fielding. The bowling, we had couple of games on those wickets where people might say we should've gotten more wickets but the wicket got better every time we fielded because they had put out the second roller on it and it had dried out from earlier in the day.

"So, the bowlers have been doing well and we have to continue restricting and getting wickets - that's the only way we can keep totals low and continue to win games."