ROSEAU–West In­dies maybe lan­guish­ing six spots be­low Aus­tralia in the in­ter­na­tion­al Test rank­ings but that will not pre­vent the Caribbean side from look­ing to stun their op­po­nents in the up­com­ing se­ries.All-rounder Ja­son Hold­er has warned that de­spite the gulf be­tween the two teams in the rank­ings, West In­dies would not al­low them­selves to be in­tim­i­dat­ed when the two-Test se­ries bowled off to­mor­row.

"They're ranked num­ber two in the world and that says a lot. We're cur­rent­ly down at eight and we need to work our way up," the 23-year-old ris­ing star said here."We have to give them the re­spect they're due but ob­vi­ous­ly we're com­ing to com­pete and win this se­ries. We'll be com­ing in quite hard at them. [We're] look­ing to be ag­gres­sive and at least con­tin­ue the rich vein of form we had in the Eng­land se­ries."

That Eng­land se­ries proved a con­fi­dence boost­er for the Caribbean side which have lan­guished near the bot­tom of the Test rank­ings in re­cent years.Seem­ing­ly head­ed for de­feat in the first Test in An­tigua last month, they bat­ted out the fi­nal day to force a draw. And though they suf­fered a nine-wick­et de­feat in the Grena­da Test, they bounced back su­perbly to win the fi­nal Test in Bar­ba­dos by five wick­ets.

One fa­mil­iar face will be miss­ing for the West In­dies when they square off with the Aussies in the open­ing Test at Wind­sor Park, how­ev­er.Vet­er­an left-han­der Shiv Chan­der­paul, who has played 164 Tests and av­er­ages near­ly 50 in 20 Tests against the Aussies, was axed by se­lec­tors last week, prompt­ing a firestorm of con­tro­ver­sy.

Hold­er said it was im­por­tant the team re­mained fo­cussed de­spite the rag­ing de­bate around Chan­der­paul's omis­sion."The ex­clu­sion of Shiv has caused a lot of talk. That's be­yond me at this present time, my fo­cus right now is on crick­et," said Hold­er. "It's quite im­por­tant we put crick­et first and try to per­form well against Aus­tralia."

CMC