While hailing the batting of Romaine Morris in the loss to Windward Islands Volcanoes last week, captain Jermaine Blackwood is confident that the team’s more senior batsmen will get their act together for the remainder of the regional four-day tournament.

The left-handed Morris, who also keeps wicket, made 34 and 68 and was effectively the lone batting spark as the Scorpions succumbed to a comprehensive defeat at Sabina Park.

Their next assignment is against Combined Campuses and Colleges at the same venue, starting on Wednesday.

“I think Morris getting his opportunity — he played a few games in the past but those were on and off — now you can see a big difference with Morris with the way he’s batting,” Blackwood said after the defeat.

“I think he’s batting excellently and this is the way we want him to play in any situation — to go out there and to express himself. We want to give players the freedom to go out there and express themselves to the best of their abilities,” the Scorpions skipper added.

The 32-year-old Blackwood, who has played 56 Tests for West Indies, failed to get going against the Volcanoes, falling for scores of 14 and 16.

Two other batsmen with West Indies experience — Chadwick Walton and Nkrumah Bonner — were also underwhelming in that encounter.

Blackwood said the runs will come.

“I’m not putting any pressure on myself to score runs. I know I can do it, so I just have to stay in a positive frame of mind, and as a leader I have to take up more responsibility.

“The rest of the [senior] guys — Chadwick Walton and Bonner — I think they’ve played cricket long enough. They know what they need to do, they know where they went wrong, so we just have to come and rectify that in the next game,” he explained.

“As a batting unit we just have to think about how we want to play and go out and execute. I think it was just decision making, I wouldn’t say [it was] too much about technique and the periods in which we got out,” Blackwood added.

—Sanjay Myers