ADMED­ABAD, In­dia – West In­dies Test cap­tain Ros­ton Chase be­lieves that head­ing in­to their two-match Test se­ries against In­dia as an un­der­dog and “with noth­ing to lose” will make them a very dan­ger­ous out­fit.

The West In­dies will look to end a 42-year Test se­ries drought on the Asian sub­con­ti­nent when the open­ing Test bowls off on Thurs­day at the Naren­dra Mo­di Sta­di­um, mid­night.

In­dia, who is ranked fourth in the ICC’s Test rank­ings, will go in­to the se­ries as over­whelm­ing favourites, hav­ing dom­i­nat­ed the eighth-ranked Windies both home and away over the past three decades.

Speak­ing in a pre-match press con­fer­ence on Wednes­day fol­low­ing his side’s fi­nal train­ing ses­sion, Chase, who will be lead­ing the Test team in his sec­ond se­ries, said his side had been giv­en very lit­tle chance of even win­ning a Test match.

“Ob­vi­ous­ly, we’re com­ing in as the un­der­dog, we have noth­ing to lose so I think that makes us quite a dan­ger­ous side.

“When you re­al­ly have noth­ing to lose, you can just go out there and play freely be­cause every­one is ex­pect­ing us to lose, so we can just go out and ex­press our­selves and play some good crick­et and just try to be as free as pos­si­ble and en­joy the crick­et,” Chase main­tained.

“Even though it may be tough or things may not go ac­cord­ing to the plan, it’s Test crick­et, so things can change in a switch, so it’s just to en­joy those tough mo­ments and try to bounce back at any point in time.”

How­ev­er, while Chase said the Windies would be play­ing with lit­tle pres­sure, he ac­knowl­edged that de­feat­ing In­dia at home would be no easy feat.

He ad­mit­ted that while the re­gion­al team’s re­cent record in Test match­es was be­low par, he said he had en­cour­aged his team­mates to fo­cus on the task at hand.

“Go­ing to any team’s home coun­try is go­ing to be tough. Teams al­ways seem to be stronger at home, but we’re up for the chal­lenge. Test crick­et is al­ways hard, so it’s not any­thing that’s new to us…

“Ob­vi­ous­ly we’re not in a good po­si­tion right now in terms of our Test sta­tus and we’re kind of low in the ta­ble, but we have to put that be­hind us and just wor­ry about what’s ahead of us right now and play each day, each game, one day at a time, one step at a time, one ses­sion at a time and try to ob­vi­ous­ly learn the con­di­tions as fast as pos­si­ble,” Chase said.

“Ob­vi­ous­ly, New Zealand came last year and dom­i­nat­ed In­dia so we’re re­al­ly try­ing to learn from what they did and try to put some of that stuff in place so that we can play some good crick­et, com­pete and try to win this se­ries.”

SQUADS

WEST IN­DIES: Ros­ton Chase (cap­tain), Jomel War­ri­can (vice-cap­tain), Kevlon An­der­son, Al­ick Athanaze, John Camp­bell, Tage­nar­ine Chan­der­paul, Justin Greaves, Shai Hope, Tevin Im­lach, Alzarri Joseph, Shamar Joseph, Bran­don King, An­der­son Phillip, Khary Pierre, Jay­den Seales.

IN­DIA: Shub­man Gill (cap­tain), Ravin­dra Jade­ja (vice-cap­tain), Yashasvi Jaisw­al, KL Rahul, B Sai Sud­harsan, De­v­dutt Padikkal, Dhruv Ju­rel, Wash­ing­ton Sun­dar, Jasprit Bum­rah, Axar Pa­tel, Ni­tish Ku­mar Red­dy, Mo­hammed Sir­aj, Prasidh Kr­ish­na, Kuldeep Ya­dav, N Ja­gadeesan.

CMC