West Indies opening batsman Chris Gayle revealed on Monday that he is expecting an Indian backlash when his team arrive for a four-match one-day series on Tuesday, after India returned recently from a disappointing tour of South Africa where they lost the ODI series 4-0 and the Test series 2-1.
Gayle was man of the series in the ICC Champions Trophy in India in November and he is relishing another chance to excel on their pitches and help his team fine-tune their game before the World Cup that the West Indies hosts in March and April.
"From a personal point of view I am excited to be playing some more cricket out there in India after I was man of the tournament in the Champions Trophy a couple of months back. I have scored a few [four] centuries against them so hopefully I can continue in the same vein on this trip," he said in his latest bigstarcricket.com diary.
"They are definitely going to come hard at us after we have had the better of them over the last few months and also because they just lost 4-0 in the one-day series in South Africa. We are going to have to be ready for them because they are match fit and we have been on a break, so they are all on their games and we are going to have to get ourselves re-acclimatized very quickly.
"The World Cup is now less than two months away and the run-in to that tournament starts here. It's World Cup [thinking] all the way now for us and I'm sure for every other team in the competition."
