ST JOHN’S, An­tigua – Head coach Daren Sam­my has re­vealed that bat­ting for long pe­ri­ods of time was one of the main talk­ing points of the West In­dies’ train­ing camp ahead of the start of their two-match Test se­ries against Sri Lan­ka.

The home side will take on Sri Lan­ka in the open­er at the Sir Vi­vian Richards Sta­di­um be­gin­ning on Thurs­day.

Speak­ing in an in­ter­view ahead of that match, Sam­my said much will be ex­pect­ed of their bat­ters in the se­ries, with the Windies search­ing for their first Test vic­to­ry in over two years.

He ex­plained that the 10-day camp which end­ed on Mon­day, paid par­tic­u­lar em­pha­sis toss im­prov­ing their bat­ting in the game’s longest for­mat.

“For us, over the first six match­es in this World Test Cham­pi­onship we have fo­cused on bat­ting for long pe­ri­ods and not los­ing so many wick­ets in a ses­sion and the abil­i­ty to not let the bowl­ing get in­to our bowl­ing line­up when some­one is bowl­ing a good spell.

“Those are ar­eas that we fo­cused on; so, a lot of con­cen­tra­tion, a lot of at­ten­tion to de­tail, es­pe­cial­ly when you’re in the nets bat­ting, putting a price on your wick­et and to bat long be­cause it’s not a sprint, more like a marathon and your true char­ac­ter will be test­ed in all for­mats of the game,” Sam­my said.

He ad­mit­ted that even though they were play­ing at home, adapt­ing to the con­di­tions ex­pect­ed in An­tigua had al­so been a big talk­ing point.

“We trained specif­i­cal­ly to look­ing at the con­di­tions that we may face, what we ex­pect here in An­tigua and what we have to do in or­der to match Sri Lan­ka’s skill set and get the bet­ter of them.

“We’ve looked at the sur­face and we have a fair idea of how it’s go­ing to play, so all of our prepa­ra­tions have been tai­lored to­wards that,” Sam­my said. (CMC)