“It’s been 24 years, we’ve not won a series here in India,” Sammy said ahead of the first game on Sunday. “So it’s a great opportunity for us as a team to come out here and challenge ourselves and measure up ourselves as to where we are in ODIs. And I think it’s a great opportunity for us, the players that we have, to come and put in a good show against India and look to win a series, something we’ve not done in 24 years.”
“If you have to win a major ICC event, especially in the white-ball format, you have to beat India,” he said. “And we playing them here at home in their conditions and performing well and winning gives us a fair idea as to what we could do as a team and how capable we are in competing on the world stage. Heading into the qualifiers in February, you know, that is our No. 1 focus – continuing to fine-tune the team so that when we go to the qualifiers, we put ourselves in a position to book our ticket to South Africa.”
Sammy, however, sees encouraging signs in the team’s progress, particularly that match-winning contributions are coming from several players rather than just one or two.
“The reality of the situation [is] we’ve not made it,” Sammy said. “However if we have to look back as to where we were and what we’ve been able to achieve as an ODI team, we’ve made some strides. Missing automatic qualification by six points, starting from where we were back then, which was, I think, 19 or 20 points behind, and accumulating those points, I thought we made a lot of strides in making a claim to automatic qualification.
