DAMBUL­LA, Sri Lan­ka – West In­dies T20 vice-cap­tain Ros­ton Chase is aim­ing for a 3-0 se­ries sweep over Sri Lan­ka in their cur­rent T20 se­ries, which he said would go a long way in help­ing the Caribbean-side re­claim the num­ber one spot in the ICC’s Men’s T20I rank­ings by the end of 2024.

The West In­dies won the open­ing T20I on Sun­day with a com­fort­able five-wick­et vic­to­ry over the home side to take a 1-0 lead in the best of three se­ries.

Chase, who has been hav­ing a su­perb year in the T20 for­mat, is hop­ing the Windies can win the sec­ond match on Tues­day and the third and fi­nal match on Thurs­day, to gain valu­able points and move up from third in the rank­ings.

The West In­dies cur­rent­ly have 255 points, two less than sec­ond placed Aus­tralia, with In­dia lead­ing the way on 268 points.

With the re­gion­al side al­so set to play three T20Is against Eng­land be­fore the end of the year, Chase be­lieves a good show­ing in both se­ries will pro­pel West In­dies to the top of the rank­ings, a po­si­tion they first held in 2016.

“We would love to get a 3-0 win in the se­ries be­cause we want to chal­lenge for that num­ber one spot by the end of the year,” Chase said.

“So every point counts and if we could get the 3-0 vic­to­ry and fin­ish the year strong in the oth­er se­ries to come, I think we will be at that num­ber one spot when the year ends.”

De­spite the vic­to­ry in the open­ing game, Chase said he still felt there were some ar­eas the team needs to im­prove on in the bat­ting and bowl­ing de­part­ments, head­ing in­to the re­main­ing match­es.

“It was a good game and a good start from the guys. I just think that we played a good game of crick­et, but af­ter the good start we had from [Bran­don] King and [Evin] Lewis I just thought that we fell down a bit in the mid­dle overs.

“We lost a cou­ple quick wick­ets so if there is just one thing that we could con­cen­trate on, not los­ing wick­ets in clus­ters, I think that we’ll be even more clin­i­cal,” Chase said.

“I thought the bowlers start­ed well in the Pow­er Play. The ball was do­ing a bit, so it was nice to see the new ball bowlers get­ting the ball to move and test­ing the Sri Lankan bats­men.

“But I just think that if we could prob­a­bly pick up a bit more, maybe one more or two more wick­ets in the mid­dle, it would make it eas­i­er for the guys to come in on the back end and ex­e­cute,” he added.

(CMC)