MOUNT MAUN­GANUI – West In­dies as­sis­tant coach Floyd Reifer has is­sued a blunt as­sess­ment of his bat­ting unit ahead of the de­ci­sive third and fi­nal Test against New Zealand, start­ing Wednes­day at Bay Oval in New Zealand.

Trail­ing 1-0 in the se­ries af­ter a heavy de­feat in Welling­ton, the tourists face a fi­nal push for re­demp­tion, but must do so with­out open­er Tage­nar­ine Chan­der­paul, who is still ruled out with a side strain.

The Windies’ prepa­ra­tion has been fur­ther dis­rupt­ed with the de­par­ture of Per­for­mance An­a­lyst Ave­nesh See­taram, who has re­turned home for a per­son­al fam­i­ly mat­ter.

The core of Reifer’s mes­sage, how­ev­er, cen­ters on a frus­trat­ing and re­cur­ring theme of the tour: the in­abil­i­ty to con­vert starts in­to match-defin­ing scores.

“We’ve spo­ken about this, and this is some­thing we want to im­prove on,” Reifer stat­ed. “When we’re in con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion, to stay in con­trol for longer pe­ri­ods of time. In Test crick­et, bat­ting is do­ing great things for long pe­ri­ods.”

The sta­tis­tics bear out his con­cern. Apart from Justin Greaves’ dou­ble hun­dred and Shai Hope’s cen­tu­ry in the first Test, the West In­dies’ bat­ting unit, on some oc­ca­sions, has got­ten a look in on­ly to give it away af­ter all the hard work.

For Reifer, the con­stant work in this area has still not borne much fruit, and he is hop­ing that the bat­ters col­lec­tive­ly can come good this time around, to prove that his and the coach­ing staff’s ef­fort is not go­ing to waste.

“We had a lot of starts, but un­for­tu­nate­ly, none of those starts con­vert­ed in­to hun­dreds,” Reifer ad­mit­ted.

His pre­scrip­tion for the ail­ment is sim­ple in the­o­ry, yet de­mand­ing in ex­e­cu­tion. He rec­om­mends dis­ci­plined ap­pli­ca­tion for ex­tend­ed ses­sions, which he be­lieves is the for­mu­la for suc­cess.

“We be­lieve that once you bat four hours plus in a Test match, you guar­an­tee a hun­dred. “It’s just about go­ing through the dif­fer­ent phas­es, un­der­stand­ing the sit­u­a­tion, and just look­ing to con­tin­ue to do what you were do­ing for long pe­ri­ods of time. That’s how we will get over this pe­ri­od of get­ting start­ed and not con­tin­u­ing.”

The con­di­tions at Mount Maun­ganui, typ­i­cal of New Zealand, will test this new­found re­solve to its lim­it. Reifer ac­knowl­edged the green-tinged pitch and the po­tent threat of the new ball.

“The first two days, it’s good for bowl­ing. The ball will nip around a lot here, but this is where we need to di­al in and be fo­cused the most.”

His ad­vice to the bat­ters was a call for tem­pered ag­gres­sion and height­ened re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. “There are cer­tain shots you can and can­not play ear­ly in New Zealand with the new ball. So just stay­ing dis­ci­plined and for play­ers to take more re­spon­si­bil­i­ty in terms of how they go about their in­nings.”

CMC