ST JOHN’S, An­tigua – All­rounder Chinelle Hen­ry is con­fi­dent West In­dies Women can pull out a win and lev­el the CG Unit­ed One-Day In­ter­na­tion­al (ODI) se­ries against New Zealand on Thurs­day, fol­low­ing their five-run loss in the first match.

And she says key to that will be the mid­dle or­der.

“We start­ed off well with the bat, but I think for us now it’s about get­ting through those mid­dle overs bet­ter where the spin­ners come on,” said Hen­ry whose 83-run part­ner­ship with Kyshona Knight helped re­build the West In­dies in­nings in Mon­day’s first match af­ter Stafanie Tay­lor, cap­tain Hay­ley Matthews and Shabi­ka Gajn­abi fell in the mid­dle overs.

Not­ing that the Caribbean side lost some quick wick­ets in the mid­dle, she stressed that was where the im­prove­ment had to come.

“As a bat­ting unit we need to ro­tate those mid­dle overs a lit­tle bit bet­ter, pick up some more sin­gles, of course…

“I think once we can dom­i­nate those mid­dle overs as a bat­ting team, we will be scor­ing 230-plus runs for the re­main­der of the two games. And I think go­ing out there, the fight that we showed as a team, as a bowl­ing unit, if we keep do­ing that go­ing for­ward then there’s no doubt we will lev­el the se­ries and then of course go on to win the se­ries,” said the right-hand­ed bats­man at a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence ahead of Wednes­day’s game.

On Mon­day, in a match re­duced to 35 overs per side due wet con­di­tions at the Sir Vi­vian Richards Sta­di­um, West In­dies bat­ted first and post­ed 168 for 7. How­ev­er, when bad light end­ed play abrupt­ly, the vis­i­tors were 159 for five off 33 overs – five runs ahead on Duck­worth-Lewis-Stern.

In that game, Hen­ry scored 44 runs, in­clud­ing four fours, off 34 balls and al­so took one wick­et.

She said her aim is to put in a per­for­mance like that each time she takes up the bat.

“As an all-rounder in this team now, an es­tab­lished all­rounder bat­ting at num­ber sev­en, if I could get 30-plus runs every match con­sis­tent­ly [and] be­ing the open­ing bowler, get­ting wick­ets con­sis­tent­ly for this team, then I think per­son­al­ly that will help my crick­et stats and al­so help the team’s per­for­mance go­ing for­ward,” Hen­ry said.

(CMC)