Samuel Badree - previously recognised by current player DJ Bravo as a Champion - has jumped the fence into the media enclosure. Not literally, that would be a bio-breach. But he’s on camera presenting the pitch report rather than playing. Curtly Ambrose makes grave pronouncements about whether some cracks in the pitch will open up. (Doubt it. It’s nighttime in St Lucia and we’ve got 40 overs to play.) The surface looks super hard, almost shiny, like clean Teflon. Teams DAN CHRISTIAN IS BACK! Yes, that’s worth Caps Lock. One of the most respected and affectionately regarded players within Australian cricket, who has increasingly become a leader and spokesman for Indigenous players, while also becoming one of the most successful and effective T20 players winning every league there is to win around the world. He played a handful of games for Australia in ODI and T20 cricket, and that inclusion ended in 2014 aside from a one-off T20 match in 2017. But now he’s back, baby. He’s become a pure late-innings finisher, which is exactly the job the national team needs filled. And he can do some handy seam bowling too. As for West Indies, an unexpected change. Kieron Pollard has been captaining this side, and did all the pre-series promotional business. But he’s not playing today with a vague injury concern, and Nicholas Pooran is captaining his national side for the first time in any format. West Indies Lendl Simmons Evin Lewis Chris Gayle Shimron Hetmyer Nicholas Pooran * + Andre Russell Dwayne Bravo Fabian Allen Hayden Walsh Obed McCoy Fidel Edwards Australia Aaron Finch * Matthew Wade + Mitchell Marsh Josh Philippe Moises Henriques Ben McDermott Daniel Christian Ashton Agar Mitchell Starc Adam Zampa Josh Hazlewood Australia win the toss and will bowl T20 cricket 101, certainly to start a series: choose to chase. That means you get to look at an unfamiliar surface while the other team has to bat on it, and you know exactly what your task is once it’s your turn. Aaron Finch gets that early advantage. Preamble One really can’t be sure, in this pandemic day and age, whether a cricket series will actually go ahead until it starts. In the last week we’ve had England’s entire ODI squad get landed in quarantine after a rash of positive tests, and then Sri Lanka’s series against India get delayed by a few days after Sri Lankan staff members caught the bug during their England tour. But in St Lucia at least, as in a number of places across the Caribbean, the corona threat has been largely contained. The visiting Australians will play the West Indies here in five Twenty20 Internationals, before moving on to Barbados for three 50-over games. The latter series is important for the ODI Super League that sorts out qualification for the next ODI World Cup. But more important in the first instance are the T20 matches, with a T20 World Cup coming up in just a few months from now. In that format, West Indies remain a formidable opponent. Plenty of bowling options, plenty of batting strikepower, with the most consistent six-hittlingly style of play in the world. The Australians are missing a few first-choice players who elected to avoid further weeks of lockdown and quarantine, but still have a broad squad of attacking players any of whom could be in consideration for the World Cup squad. In terms of what both these sides bring to the series, it shapes as a high-action contest.