BIRM­ING­HAM – Fol­low­ing a lean run of scores by open­ers Bran­don King and Evin Lewis in their just con­clud­ed se­ries against Ire­land, West In­dies white ball skip­per Shai Hope is bank­ing on them to come good in their up­com­ing One Day In­ter­na­tion­al (ODI) se­ries against Eng­land which be­gins in Eng­land on Thurs­day.

Both bats­men strug­gled at the top of the or­der, with King scor­ing 29 runs in the three ODIs at an av­er­age of 9.67, while Lewis scored 36 runs at an av­er­age of 12.

How­ev­er, speak­ing in a pre-match press con­fer­ence on Wednes­day, Hope said de­spite their run of low scores, he ex­pects the two ex­pe­ri­enced open­ers to show their qual­i­ty against the home side in their three-match se­ries.

“It’s very im­por­tant to bank on pre­vi­ous suc­cess. They’ve shown how ca­pa­ble they are to per­form at this lev­el and play­ing at the in­ter­na­tion­al lev­el the biggest thing for me is con­fi­dence.

“As a bat­ter, as long as you have the con­fi­dence, re­gard­less of if the runs are com­ing or not, it’s on­ly a mat­ter of time be­fore that big score comes,” Hope said.

“They are two class play­ers, qual­i­ty play­ers and I think it is a bless­ing in dis­guise in a sense where they will be even more hun­gry for this se­ries not hav­ing that big spark in Ire­land.

“So, if they can click along with the mid­dle or­der which has been scor­ing runs for the last cou­ple of months, I think we’re go­ing to be a very, very good bat­ting line­up,” he main­tained.

Hope said the re­gion­al team had made tremen­dous strides with­in the past year, es­pe­cial­ly in their bat­ting, where they had shown they were among the best ODI sides in the world.

He said based on those per­for­mances he ex­pect­ed the West In­dies to com­pete fierce­ly with Eng­land.

“Cer­tain­ly, we’re do­ing more than com­pet­ing. When you look at the da­ta over the last year or so we have been match­ing sta­tis­ti­cal­ly the top four bat­ting teams and like I said pre­vi­ous­ly, there are so many things we can com­mend the boys on over the last few se­ries and the last few months.

“The bat­ting has been a big stand­out for me per­son­al­ly and it’s great to see the boys are chip­ping in and al­ways find­ing ways to im­prove their game to be at that elite stan­dard that we ask for in in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et,” Hope said.

“It’s just a step­ping­stone, so we just have to keep im­prov­ing in every sin­gle area as best as we can and then have that com­plete team and per­for­mances more con­sis­tent­ly over the next few years.”

CMC