COLOM­BO–Open­er John­son Charles says he will be gun­ning for three fig­ures in to­mor­row's fi­nal One-Day In­ter­na­tion­al against Sri Lan­ka, as he looks to build on his ex­cit­ing half-cen­tu­ry in the sec­ond game here Wednes­day.

The 26-year-old pum­melled a stroke-filled 83 at the R Pre­madasa Sta­di­um but it proved in vain as West In­dies went down by eight wick­ets to con­cede the three-match se­ries with a game re­main­ing. De­spite the loss, Charles said he felt good about the knock and would be look­ing for some­thing big­ger in the next game.

"I think it was a con­trolled in­nings but at the end I couldn't car­ry on and that was a dis­ap­point­ment but com­ing back in­to the team it was a good start and I'm look­ing to build on it and get some big­ger scores–a 100, 150 in the]next match," he said.

Though West In­dies crashed to 29 for two in the fifth over, the right-hand­ed Charles backed him­self and played his shots, hit­ting sev­en fours and four six­es to post his fourth ODI half-cen­tu­ry.

In the process, he pow­ered a 70-run third wick­et stand with Dar­ren Bra­vo (21) be­fore adding a fur­ther 40 runs for the fourth wick­et with stand-in cap­tain Mar­lon Samuels who made 63.

Charles said it was im­por­tant for him to re­main pos­i­tive de­spite the loss of wick­ets and es­pe­cial­ly fac­ing a new ball bowler like La­sith Ma­lin­ga.

"My ap­proach ba­si­cal­ly is to be as pos­i­tive as pos­si­ble. From the time I've known my­self that's how I've bat­ted," he ex­plained.

"If I've got to start the re­build­ing process, I've got to do it my way and that's how I chose to do it."

He added: "I know Ma­lin­ga has a very good slow­er ball and a very good [bounc­er] so I just looked out for these two, not bar­ring the fact he swings the ball away from me. It's al­ways a dif­fi­cult task to start an in­nings but you've just got to stick in there and do it how you know to do it."

Af­ter a three-hour rain break forced a re­duc­tion in overs to 38 per side, West In­dies saw their in­nings tail away bad­ly in the dy­ing stages, as they lost four wick­ets for three runs in the space of five de­liv­er­ies–with all four wick­ets falling via the run out route.

Charles said this could have been the turn­ing point of the con­test, with the Caribbean side lim­it­ed to 214 and set­ting Sri Lan­ka 225 un­der the Duck­worth/Lewis method. (CMC)

"Hav­ing four run outs and hav­ing one of our set bats­men [get­ting out] out, you nev­er know how much we could have got­ten," Charles point­ed out. "With two overs to go we could have got­ten 15 to 30 runs and that could have been a ma­jor dif­fer­ence. I think it hurt us a bit and had we not lost those four wick­ets at a cru­cial time, I think we could have ac­tu­al­ly pulled it off." ()