Holder wants top-order batsmen to pull their weight

Totals of 181, 196, 311 and 127 in the 2-0 series loss to India show why Holder has such an opinion.

Only one Windies batsman – Roston Chase with 185 runs from four innings – featured in the list of top-five scorers in the series that was dominated by the 18-year-old Player of the Series, Prithvi Shaw, and the 20-year-old Rishabh Pant.

"In my short tenure as a Test cricketer (I've learnt that) you've got to be patient and build on what performance you intend to put on," Holder said after the second Test in Hyderabad, which India won by 10 wickets to complete a series sweep.

"You can look and honestly say we didn't put enough runs on the board. Quite for some time now we've been relatively inconsistent and that has really let us down in the recent past. We haven't been getting the runs we've been looking for.

"Anybody knows that in any form of cricket you ask the top five-six batsmen get the bulk of runs. It hasn't been happening."

The Windies top order has been a cause for concern – they were 92/4 in the first innings in Hyderabad and 68/5 in the second – and the batsmen coming lower down the order, Chase and Holder included, have had to rescue the team, which hasn't been ideal.

"We have heavily relied on middle and lower half which is not ideal. So we need to rectify at the top," Holder said. "The guys in the top five have to put hands up and come to the party."

Even in the first Test at Rajkot, the visitors failed to cross 200 and were 74/6 before Chase and Keemo Paul took the team past the 100-run mark in their first essay. However, that didn't prove to be enough as the Windies were asked to follow on and were eventually handed an innings defeat.

"There are times that you've got to put your foot down and let people know exactly they are not putting their weight," Holder said. "At the end of the day, you've got to get deeper into it, understanding why the collapses keep happening.

"And it's not a matter of guys having technical deficiencies, it's just the processes at particular stages may be the best one and especially our younger players really need to understand that patience is the name of the game."

After the limited-overs leg of this tour, which comprises of five one-day internationals and three Twenty20 Internationals, the Windies will be off to Bangladesh for their next assignment in whites and Holder feels it will be another trial by spin just as it was in India.

"We are headed to Bangladesh after this and Bangladesh will hit us with a lot of spinners," he said. "The wickets will probably spin a lot more than these spun in the last two Test matches. I felt personally the wickets were pretty good."