The West Indies Women open their Women’s ICC World Cup campaign against New Zealand tonight in poor batting form and Captain Stafanie Taylor believes that if the team is to be competitive, they have to turn that form around and bat with better consistency.

In two warm-up matches against Australia and India, the West Indies Women failed to score 200 runs each time losing by 90 and 81 runs, respectively. And while Head Coach Courtney Walsh preferred to focus on the positives, the realities of the situation are that if they are to do well, they have to produce scores well above 200 runs consistently.

Those thoughts were communicated at a recent team meeting.

"We had our meeting and we said that to be competitive we have to be scoring over two hundred runs," Taylor said in a pre-match interview. "In the two games that we played, we didn't do so. So that's something that we've had a look at and, moving forward, that's something that we need to work at."

Taylor believes the players need to spend time at the crease building innings that will give the team opportunities to get big scores that will give them better chances against Australia, India and tonight’s opponents, New Zealand.

"When it comes down to the longer format, we just need to spend more time out there in the middle. That's an area that we've been falling down a lot in, rotating the strike and try to build more partnerships. We haven't been building a lot of partnerships so hence the reason why we keep falling down in that department," Taylor argued while acknowledging that there has been less dependence of batters like Deandra Dottin, Hayley Matthews and her, to get runs.

In recent times, players like Kycia Knight and Chedean Nation have been getting good scores but other batters still need to step up with greater frequency, Taylor said.

"The other batters are starting to contribute. What we need to do is be in that collective in each game, be consistent. That's something that I've talked about a lot, being consistent, not just one or two batters always performing and probably looking at how teams are playing, a lot more fifties, batters stepping up and taking that responsibility. As batters we have to do that more consistently," Taylor said.