After the washout in Jamaica, the Indians find themselves back in Barbados, the scene of their first crime on this tour. The shameful capitulation on the first morning of the Kensington Oval Test will still haunt the side, but at least the one-day format spares them too much of the short-ball treatment that exposed their inadequacies in painful fashion three weeks ago. The series has now become a best-of-three shootout, not good news for two middle-of-the-road teams that need all the practice they can get with the World Cup just nine months away. India suffered a ten-wicket thumping in their last limited-overs outing here, and the 1988-89 squad did little better, losing by 50 runs. Their overall record in the Caribbean does little to inspire confidence either, with just two wins in 14 (inclusive of two no results). One of those rare successes came at Berbice in 1983 and was the launch pad for the shock World Cup win a month later.

West Indies probably need to experiment more than India, with several young batsmen fighting for places in a top order that is far from settled. The bowling has a sameness to it – a medium-paced blandness that needs to be spiced up in time for the World Cup. Carl Hooper's gentle offbreaks can be relied upon as a last resort but it's foolish to expect him to emulate a Muttiah Muralitharan or a Harbhajan Singh.

India too need to cobble together an effective bowling attack to back a tremendously exciting batting line-up. Tinu Yohannan – whose Test series began and ended on the substitutes bench – will get his chance, as will Ajit Agarkar. Ashish Nehra and Zaheer Khan bowled themselves half into the ground in the Test matches, and both deserve a break. Nehra will get one here, while Zaheer can expect to get some rest in Trinidad. Murali Kartik could well be roped in for the Port-of-Spain games, on a surface traditionally kinder to slow bowlers, but he has no chance of displacing Harbhajan as the lone spinner in Barbados.

Gambling with Rahul Dravid behind the stumps is flirting with danger. Keeping wicket on a pitch with erratic bounce is not good news for the fingers and the last thing India need with an England tour on the horizon is for their most reliable batsmen to do a Nasser Hussain. For Dravid though, it's a question of keeping his head afloat in the midst of ferocious competition for batting places. The fact that he and VVS Laxman might struggle to get a look-in says much about the willow-wielding talent available. The problem is that the great pretenders – Yuvraj Singh, Dinesh Mongia and Mohammed Kaif – have yet to prove themselves away from home. Giving English and Zimbabwean bowlers the runaround on featherbed tracks at home is one thing, doing battle on pitches that afford both bounce and lateral movement quite another. This will be a big examination for them, as will the tri-series in England next month.

The young blood will certainly up the energy levels on the field though, and that's good news after some comatose displays in the Tests. Yuvraj and Kaif are superb athletes, something that can't be said for any of their senior colleagues. Most one-day matches these days are meaningless run-of-the-mill affairs that count for little, but for these two teams, Barbados will be an important first step taken on a reconstruction job that needs to be complete by early next year.

Squads
West Indies 1 Chris Gayle, 2 Wavell Hinds, 3 Ramnaresh Sarwan, 4 Brian Lara, 5 Carl Hooper (capt), 6 Shivnarine Chanderpaul, 7 Ridley Jacobs (wk), 8 Gareth Breese, 9 Ryan Hinds, 10 Mervyn Dillon, 11 Pedro Collins, 12 Cameron Cuffy, 13 Corey Collymore.

India 1 Sourav Ganguly (capt), 2 Sachin Tendulkar, 3 Rahul Dravid, 4 Virender Sehwag, 5 VVS Laxman, 6 Dinesh Mongia, 7 Mohammed Kaif, 8 Yuvraj Singh, 9 Ajay Ratra (wk), 10 Ajit Agarkar, 11 Harbhajan Singh, 12 Zaheer Khan, 13 Tinu Yohannan, 14 Ashish Nehra, 15 Murali Kartik.

Dileep Premachandran is assistant editor of Wisden.com in India.

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