COLOM­BO–West In­dies cap­tain Ja­son Hold­er said the loss of seam­er An­dre Rus­sell to in­jury and hav­ing to re­sort to part-time bowlers, were key in the one-wick­et de­feat to Sri Lan­ka in the open­ing One-Day In­ter­na­tion­al on Sun­day.

Rus­sell limped out of the at­tack in the fifth over with Sri Lan­ka mo­tor­ing along at 46 for one in pur­suit of 163 off 26 overs, and Hold­er was forced to sum­mon Jonathan Carter and John­son Charles to trun­dle their medi­um pace at the cru­cial late stage of the game.

"It's ob­vi­ous­ly very dis­ap­point­ing. I thought the way we fought our­selves back in­to the game, to lose there in the penul­ti­mate over was very, very hard, al­though we thought we were in with a chance there when he had them nine down," Hold­er said.

"It's just un­for­tu­nate we lost Rus­sell at that stage, I felt his overs would have been cru­cial on that track and we had to make up with two part-time bowlers which re­al­ly didn't pay off in the end.

"But again, cred­it to the way the guys fought down to the end, and we still got wick­ets from a part-time bowler and made a game of it."

Sri Lan­ka seemed poised to pull off an easy win at the R Pre­madasa Sta­di­um when they raced to 132 for four at the end of the 18th over but off-spin­ner Sunil Nar­ine grabbed three wick­ets in the 19th and Carter, an­oth­er two in the 24th, as five wick­ets crashed for 20 runs.

With the hosts tot­ter­ing on 152 for nine, Charles was asked to bowl the penul­ti­mate over with 11 runs re­quired from 12 balls. He start­ed with a wide, al­so sent down a front-foot no ball, and Ajan­tha Mendis de­posit­ed the re­sult­ing free-hit out of the ground, to end the game.

Hold­er said re­sort­ing to Carter and Charles was un­avoid­able and ex­plained he was forced to bowl them late be­cause of the need to use the front­line bowlers to ar­rest Sri Lan­ka's progress, af­ter they got off to a fly­er.

"We were short a bowler, and short of cru­cial overs from a front­line bowler so we had to find some way to make up. The on­ly way we could fight our way back in­to the game was by get­ting wick­ets," Hold­er ex­plained.

"We got wick­ets but had to bowl our best bowlers out be­fore the al­lot­ted overs [were fin­ished]. In that case, you have to bank on some­body to make up the last few overs and it didn't pay off in to­day's game."

He con­tin­ued: "We were off to a pret­ty bad start in terms of the pow­er play and we had to pull back the game by tak­ing wick­ets. It was dif­fi­cult to con­tain them and re­strict them with­out tak­ing wick­ets.

"We had to take wick­ets to get the [ad­van­tage] and the on­ly way I could get wick­ets was by go­ing to my main bowlers. I would rather go down that way than go down with the part-time bowlers and leav­ing my main bowlers with overs."

Rus­sell's fit­ness will be as­sessed over the next few days as the vis­i­tors pre­pare for the sec­ond ODI at the same venue on Wednes­day.

CMC