West In­dies must be gag­ging to board the flight home now. It has been a tor­rid tour: they haven't won, the weath­er has been poor and po­lit­i­cal dis­cus­sions have again done plen­ty to over­shad­ow their crick­et. At least their last en­gage­ment is on­ly 40 overs long; and the lot­tery of Twen­ty20 crick­et per­haps pro­vides their best chance of vic­to­ry. They can take heart from their last T20 in Eng­land, in Sep­tem­ber 2011, when a far less ex­pe­ri­enced side than that which will line up at Trent Bridge beat the world cham­pi­ons in the for­mat. Like the ODI se­ries, many peo­ple would start them as favourites be­cause of the pow­er of their hit­ters-West In­dies have more guys that can clear the ropes than Eng­land.

But they have to do some ac­tu­al hit­ting in or­der to win and we saw lit­tle of their po­ten­tial in the two one-day match­es, when West In­dies were quick­ly snuffed out by Eng­land's su­perb bowl­ing at­tack.It will be with the ball that Eng­land will look to put down a mark­er, a few months out from the de­fence of their World Twen­ty20 crown in Sep­tem­ber. Jade Dern­bach-whose pace and vari­a­tions are best suit­ed to T20–could make an emo­tion­al ap­pear­ance, less than a week af­ter the death of his Sur­rey team-mate Tom May­nard. He held his nerve to win Eng­land the de­cid­ing T20I in Abu Dhabi in Feb­ru­ary and will look to push his case for in­clu­sion in the oth­er for­mats.

West In­dies squad: Dwayne Smith, Chris Gayle, Mar­lon Samuels, Kieron Pol­lard, Dwayne Bra­vo, Dar­ren Sam­my (capt), An­dre Rus­sell, De­nesh Ramdin Tino Best, Sunil Nar­ine, Ravi Ram­paul.