BREADY, Ire­land – New­ly ap­point­ed West In­dies T20 cap­tain Shai Hope is re­lieved that the team end­ed its tour of Ire­land on a win­ning note af­ter a dis­ap­point­ing tour of the UK where they were sound­ly beat­en by Eng­land.

The Windies thumped Ire­land by 62 runs in the third and fi­nal T20I on Sun­day to claim the three-match se­ries 1-0, af­ter the first two games were rained out.

It was a wel­come re­lief for the white-ball cap­tain, fol­low­ing back-to-back 3-0 de­feats to Eng­land in the pre­ced­ing One Day In­ter­na­tion­al and T20I se­ries.

The West In­dies al­so bat­tled to a 1-1 draw with Ire­land in their rain-af­fect­ed ODI se­ries.

Speak­ing to the me­dia af­ter the win, Hope said he was glad the re­gion­al team was able to end in win­ning fash­ion af­ter a dis­ap­point­ing string of re­sults.

“It was very im­por­tant, es­pe­cial­ly on the back of that Eng­lish se­ries that we had cou­ple days ago.

“They ba­si­cal­ly gave us a bat­ter­ing, so it’s great to fin­ish the UK tour on a high,” Hope said.

“…We didn’t get crick­et in the first two T20Is but just to fin­ish the tour on a high, dis­play­ing the way we want to go about play­ing our crick­et is a great thing to see.”

Hope laud­ed the ef­forts of his bat­ting unit, which helped them to post an im­pres­sive 256 for five from their 20 overs, their sec­ond high­est T20I score.

He said the ap­proach that they took was sore­ly miss­ing against Eng­land.

“I be­lieve that’s the brand of crick­et that we’re try­ing to play. Some­thing that we’re al­ways speak­ing about is throw­ing that first punch, en­sur­ing that we put pres­sure on their bowlers and don’t al­low them to set­tle as much.

“It is some­thing I felt we lacked a bit in the Eng­land se­ries…” Hope said.

“It was a won­der­ful dis­play from the bat­ters to­day, es­pe­cial­ly Evin [Lewis] get­ting that good start. You know once he gets flow­ing, he’s a very de­struc­tive bat­ter, so I’m hap­py to see the guys rais­ing their hands in the bat­ting group and hope­ful­ly we can con­tin­ue like that as a team.”

CMC