Series whitewash testament to Windies ‘venom’, says Pollard

LUCKNOW, India (CMC) — Captain Kieron Pollard has praised West Indies’ killer instinct after they completed a rare series whitewash on Monday by sweeping the three-match one-day series against Afghanistan.

The Caribbean side had wrapped up the series last Saturday when they took a winning 2-0 lead but produced another clinical effort in the third way to come away with a five-wicket win.
“Winning is a habit and anything we want to do in terms of coming out and playing a cricket game, it’s a process and it’s a process we want to follow each and every time,” Pollard said.

“Despite the result that may happen, it’s a matter of improving as we go along. We knew we hadn’t [whitewashed a team] in a while but again, when teams have us in these sort of positions, they put their foot on our throats so it was a perfect opportunity to come out and show we have that venom inside of us.”

He continued: “We knew as well we would be going into this game with an inexperienced bowling line-up so give and take 20, 30 runs, if you look at it, it was the most Afghanistan scored in this series.

“We knew had to rally as a team and again in conversations, we spoke about batting 50 overs and again we proved we can bat 50 overs and once we bat 50 overs we’re going to score runs and win games.”

Set 250 for victory, West Indies were in trouble when they lost two cheap wickets with just four runs on the board in the third over but opener Shai Hope stroked his seventh ODI hundred to rescue the run chase.