India chose to bowl v West Indies
Scorecard
There was no dearth of box-office names on show on the weekend in Florida, but in a big disappointment to the crowd Chris Gayle was missing from the West Indies line-up because of injury. His replacement at the top of the order, Andre Fletcher, also the wicketkeeper, was expected to be in immediate action as India’s captain MS Dhoni elected to field after winning the toss on a sunny morning.
India too unveiled a bit of a surprise at the top of the order, with Shikhar Dhawan making way for KL Rahul, who had a good IPL and had also pushed Dhawan out of the Test side.
Evin Lewis replaced Gayle in the West Indies XI while Fletcher filled the void left by the sacked Denesh Ramdin. Kieron Pollard took Darren Sammy’s place. Sunil Narine, back with a cleared action, replaced Sulieman Benn in the XI that West Indies played in their previous T20I. This was Carlos Brathwaite’s captaincy debut.
India strengthened their bowling by going for Stuart Binny ahead of a specialist batsman. There were five other specialist bowlers in the side, with Amit Mishra and Umesh Yadav missing out.
West Indies 1 Johnson Charles, 2 Andre Fletcher (wk), 3 Marlon Samuels, 4 Lendl Simmons, 5 Evin Lewis, 6 Dwayne Bravo, 7 Andre Russell, 8 Kieron Pollard, 9 Carlos Brathwaite (capt), 10 Sunil Narine, 11 Samuel Badree
India 1 Rohit Sharma, 2 KL Rahul, 3 Virat Kohli, 4 Ajinkya Rahane, 5 MS Dhoni (capt & wk), 6 Stuart Binny, 7 Ravindra Jadeja, 8 R Ashwin, 9 Bhuvneshwar Kumar, 10 Jasprit Bumrah, 11 Mohammed Shami