KINGSTON, Ja­maica – Head coach Phil Sim­mons says West In­dies will use the Ire­land and Eng­land Twen­ty20 as­sign­ments lat­er this month to re­vamp their bat­ting ap­proach, as the Caribbean side look to re­build in the wake of a dis­as­trous T20 World Cup last Oc­to­ber.

West In­dies flat­tered to de­ceive at the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates show­piece, los­ing four of their five games to fin­ish one from the bot­tom of their group and miss­ing out on a se­mi-fi­nal spot.

And with sev­er­al changes made to that World Cup squad, Sim­mons said much of the fo­cus would now be on re­ha­bil­i­tat­ing the bat­ting to achieve larg­er and more com­pet­i­tive to­tals.

“We’ve al­ways been try­ing to do things a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent and to step up things in the way we bat,” Sim­mons told re­porters.

“I think our bat­ting is what we’re go­ing to fo­cus on a lot be­cause we need to be mak­ing the 160s, the 180s in or­der to chal­lenge peo­ple, and our bowl­ing seems to be ready to de­fend scores like that.

“So we’re go­ing to be push­ing on the bats­men to get us there with dif­fer­ent meth­ods.

“It’s not all go­ing to be about hit­ting the six­es. That’s our strong suit but we’re go­ing to try adding dif­fer­ent things to it.”

In their first game of last year’s World Cup, West In­dies were dis­missed for a near-his­toric low of 55 against Eng­land in Dubai and timid scores of 143, 142, 169 and 157 fol­lowed in their re­main­ing out­ings.

Key com­po­nents of the bat­ting unit failed to spark with big hit­ters like vet­er­an Chris Gayle scrap­ing on­ly 45 runs from five in­nings, cap­tain Kieron Pol­lard man­ag­ing 90 runs and the ex­plo­sive An­dre Rus­sell, 25 runs al­so from five ap­pear­ances.

With nei­ther three fea­tur­ing on last De­cem­ber’s three-match Pak­istan tour, West In­dies sur­passed 200 for on­ly the third time in three years in the fi­nal T20 In­ter­na­tion­al, and Sim­mons said he want­ed to see that en­er­gy con­tin­ued.

“The way we start­ed in Pak­istan is the way we want to play now – a lot more en­er­gy, a lot more en­thu­si­asm,” Sim­mons ex­plained.

“It’s a young group of guys and we’re try­ing to mold them and get them in­to a frame of mind that we want to win and we want to do every­thing that it takes to win, so I can safe­ly say there will be a lit­tle more ex­cite­ment as we go along now.”

West In­dies face Ire­land in a one-off T20 In­ter­na­tion­al at Sabi­na Park here on Jan­u­ary 16 fol­low­ing a three-match One-Day In­ter­na­tion­al se­ries at the same venue, be­fore mov­ing on to Bar­ba­dos for a high­ly an­tic­i­pat­ed five-match T20I se­ries against Eng­land at Kens­ing­ton Oval from Jan­u­ary 22-30.

The fix­tures kick off what is ex­pect­ed to be an in­tense sched­ule as the two-time World cham­pi­ons beef up prepa­ra­tion for the T20 World Cup next Oc­to­ber in Aus­tralia.

In ad­di­tion to im­prov­ing as­pects of the bat­ting, Sim­mons said there were oth­er tweaks that were al­so need­ed in oth­er ar­eas of the Caribbean side’s game.

“I think one of the things that has let us down a lit­tle bit is our run­ning be­tween the wick­ets and that’s one of the things we’re putting a lot of em­pha­sis on,” he stressed.

“When you go in­to the [field­ing], we’ve been mak­ing changes for run-outs but we’ve not been hit­ting the stumps di­rect­ly enough.

“These are small things in com­par­i­son to [mak­ing] the to­tal of 180 but they be­come big things if you’re do­ing them, and ef­fect­ing a run-out here or run­ning two here and putting pres­sure on the oth­er team.

“[There are] small things like that but in the end, they will turn out to be big things.”

(CMC)