CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand – West In­dies bat­ting coach, Floyd Reifer is ex­pect­ing his bat­ters to come to the fore when the re­gion­al side takes on New Zealand in a three-match One Day In­ter­na­tion­al se­ries be­gin­ning Sat­ur­day (No­vem­ber 15).

The ninth-ranked Windies head in­to the se­ries as un­der­dogs against the sec­ond-best ODI side in the world and will be look­ing for cru­cial points as they seek au­to­mat­ic qual­i­fi­ca­tion to the 2027 Crick­et World Cup.

Speak­ing in a pre-match press con­fer­ence on Sat­ur­day, Reifer said he had seen some ma­jor bat­ting im­prove­ments in the ODI for­mat and he ex­pect­ed that to con­tin­ue in­to the New Zealand se­ries.

“We didn’t get to the last World Cup and be­tween then and now we’ve made some changes, and we’ve played de­cent crick­et.

“We’re try­ing to work on our con­sis­ten­cy in all three de­part­ments, and I think that our bat­ting has re­al­ly come leaps and bounds in the ODI for­mat. We’ve man­aged to win a few se­ries as well, man­aged to gain some points and we’ve moved two spaces up the ta­ble,” Reifer said.

“So now we’re look­ing for­ward to this se­ries and ob­vi­ous­ly look­ing to do well. Once we win some games, we can gain some more points go­ing for­ward in­to that World Cup qual­i­fi­ca­tion.”

Reifer, who played eight ODIs for the West In­dies, said Shai Hope, Kea­cy Car­ty and Sher­fane Ruther­ford were among some of the best ODI bats­men in the world.

He said once that trio per­formed to ex­pec­ta­tions, the West In­dies would be tough to beat.

“We’ve been play­ing to­geth­er from 2023 and one of the things that we did was give Kea­cy Car­ty a role at num­ber three and he re­spond­ed very well to that.

“We have guys like Kea­cy, Shai Hope, who are two of the best ODI bat­ters in the world, and you have [Sher­fane] Ruther­ford, who like those guys is av­er­ag­ing 50 plus. The strik­ing as well is over 80, Ruther­ford prob­a­bly strik­ing over 90, so I think it is the cream of the crop of the bat­ting in terms of the mid­dle or­der,” Reifer said.

“At the top of the in­nings we’ve been do­ing pret­ty well, so I think that our bat­ting unit is kind of falling in­to place and the more crick­et these guys play, the bet­ter they will get and we will get that bat­ting syn­er­gy grow­ing amongst the guys, and in any team for­mat once you get that syn­er­gy we will al­ways see im­prove­ments.”

CMC