COLOM­BO–Dar­ren Sam­my has urged his West In­dies side to re­main fo­cussed on the task at hand, fol­low­ing the drawn sec­ond Test against Sri Lan­ka. The weath­er has bad­ly dis­rupt­ed the se­ries, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the sec­ond Test at the Pre­madasa Sta­di­um, where West In­dies al­lowed Sri Lan­ka to re­cov­er from a shaky start to con­trol the game. "It's al­ways dif­fi­cult when you are on and off the crick­et field," said the West In­dies cap­tain. [On Sat­ur­day's last day] it looked like we wouldn't have any play, but the weath­er cleared up. This is some­thing as pro­fes­sion­als we have to mas­ter." The three-match se­ries re­mains lev­el at 0-0, with the third and fi­nal Test, start­ing on Wednes­day at Pallekele.

One of the ar­eas of con­cern for West In­dies will again be their field­ing, with a few dropped catch­es, in­clud­ing Sam­my's re­prieve of cen­tu­ry-mak­er Ku­mar San­gakkara, the Sri Lan­ka cap­tain, prov­ing cost­ly.

"I know the po­ten­tial we have as a field­ing team," he said. "The guys work hard, and put a high lev­el of qual­i­ty on their field­ing. "In crick­et, you drop catch­es, but what I would like to see is half-chances to go in our favour, at least one or two." He said: "We haven't been able to cap­i­talise on the half-chances our bowlers cre­at­ed. But all in all, we could work on it and cor­rect it."

Sam­my ac­knowl­edged his amaze­ment that West In­dies would en­ter the fi­nal Test with­out the se­ries de­cid­ed. He be­lieves the vis­i­tors are tak­ing small steps to­wards restor­ing the rep­u­ta­tion that the West In­dies team once held. "You don't change overnight," he said. "You have a process. I must say that our work eth­ic has been ex­cel­lent. "Even the fight we showed [on Sat­ur­day], it's good to see that we are think­ing of the fans at home. They are wak­ing up at ear­ly hours to watch this game. "From the re­ports we have got from [the Caribbean], peo­ple are quite hap­py to see the fight the team is putting up."