India vs West Indies: Virat Kohli and Co aim to seal another home ODI series win while Windies hope to draw level in final match

A drawn match at Visakhapatnam followed by the 43-run triumph at Pune - prior to the Mumbai game, Windies gave a wake-up call to their much-fancied host in the ongoing five-match ODI series. However, at Brabourne Stadium, India responded emphatically in an anticlimactic contest, outplaying the visitors completely by a massive 224 runs. Now, with the series poised at 2-1, the caravan has moved to the southern part of the country as both the teams gear up to lock horns for the one final time in the 50-over format on this tour at the Greenfield International Stadium, Thiruvananthapuram, which will be hosting its inaugural ODI.

No side has beaten India twice in a home ODI series since October 2016 and in order to keep this record intact, Virat Kohli would like his team to emulate their Mumbai performance. With bat, centurions Rohit Sharma and Ambati Rayudu were the two shining lights for India. Especially, amid the long-standing middle-order jigsaw, Rayudu’s ton while batting at No 4, must have been a sigh of relief for the team management.

However, the order hasn’t been restored just yet.

On Monday, Indian think-tank dropped youngster Rishabh Pant, primarily to accommodate comeback man Keder Jadhav in the XI. Whereas they persisted with misfiring MS Dhoni. In an ideal world, on current form, Pant should be India’s first-choice keeper but it seems the team management is yet not ready to look beyond the old fox Dhoni. So, it is high time for the former skipper to justify this faith of the team management by contributing with the bat.

Meanwhile, Dhoni is just one run away from from becoming the fifth Indian batsman to score 10,000 ODI runs after Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and Kohli.

In the bowling department, youngster Khaleel Ahmed had an impressive outing in Mumbai, with his late swing and the left-arm angle. Though in Thiruvananthapuram, on a much drier surface and under humid conditions, the 20-year old will face a much stiffer ask of taming the Windies batting.

The conditions will be tempting for the team management to bring leggie Yuzvendra Chahal back in the XI. But for that they have to drop one of the three seamers or Ravindra Jadeja, which at this point seems highly unlikely.

Nevertheless, Windies, who are still in with the chances of leveling the series, have their own share of problems. Their batting seems heavily dependent on Shai Hope and Shimron Hetmeyer. The duo has done the bulk of scoring for them in this series and there hasn’t been enough support for them from the rest of the batting line-up. So far their openers - Chandrapaul Hemraj and Kieran Powell - haven’t provided the starts which the team needs. And in the middle-order, Marlon Samuels and Rovman Powell have failed to get the ball rolling as well.

Hence, we can expect their think-tank to bring top-order batsman Sunil Ambris in the XI, replacing either Hemraj or Powell. Ambris, who featured in the Test series as well, is a hard-hitting batsman. In the two-day warm-up game prior to the Test series, the youngster scored a 98-ball 114 and grabbed a lot of headlines. But he failed to live upto the expectations during the two-Test series. Now, in the coloured clothing, Ambris can provide the necessary push, which this batting line-up is looking for.

On the bowling front, the dry pitch at the Greenfield International Stadium will be ideal for a wrist-spinner like Devendra Bishoo, who was benched in the last two matches to play left-arm spinner Fabien Allen. Unfortunately, the experiment hasn’t worked for the visitors so far. Hence, in this series-decider, Jason Holder should trust his experienced man Bishoo.

The conditions for this game will be a bit extreme. It will be hot and humid throughout and there is a 40 percent chance of a thunderstorm during the afternoon. Actually, over here, in this heat both captains won’t mind batting first and then coming back in the evening to defend the total.