West Indies Women captain, Stafanie Taylor believes that her team will consistently need to score around 230 runs as they prepare to face South Africa women in four Women One Day Internationals.
Taylor briefed the media yesterday ahead of today’s day/night series opener that the side is injury free and confident after their last training session and reasoned that they are focused on the task at hand today before moving on mentally to the next three matches.
“I’m pretty confident, I think for us it is more consistency, the coaching staff that we have is kind of breaking things down, some of the things we didn’t know from back then from how long we’ve been playing to see where we are at now it’s quite good, I think it is a reflection for all of us, for us to do better as bowlers or batters or us as a team so I think we are trying to focus on, we know we are at 230 [runs] so we are trying to consistently hit the 230 mark and then move from there,” the Jamaican said.
According to the 30-year-old, “The warm up game was pretty much to get acclimatized to the condition and the pitch, I find the pitch was really good and I think the focus for us was on what we want to do and we are pretty pleased even though we didn’t get what we wanted but we see improvement especially with the batters and then we find the bowlers were really good.”
In the warm up match it was Guyanese duo, Shemaine Campbelle (42) and Cherry Ann Fraser (3-11) leading the charge.
The squad features the inclusion of several young players including Mandy Mangru, Jannilea Glasgow and Kaysia Schultz as well as a number of experienced campaigners including Afy Fletcher.
The all-rounder shared that while they didn’t do that well results-wise against this very opposition last year, a lot of positives were taken.
Taylor stated, “We had a really good series against Pakistan in Pakistan, we didn’t do so well against South Africa back home, couple players did well, that’s a plus and we try to take those positives.”
She added, “Yes we are in South Africa’s backyard, we know it is not going to be an easy one but the good thing is they have a couple of their main players out so hopefully that can turn for us and with saying that we know they still have good batters, capable players who could definitely turn the switch so we just have to be on our toes.”
