Pakistan Hockey Captain Mohammad Imran not confident for Asian Champions Trophy – Hockey News
The Pakistan Hockey Captain Mohammad Imran is not quite confident of their performance in the six-team competition of the Asian Champions Trophy.
Skipper of the Greenshirts Mohammad Imran is looking best possible combination of senior players and youngsters for delivering gold-medal performance in the eight-day regional gala. The event is scheduled to be held in Chinese city of Ordos from September
3 to 11 where five more teams including India, China, South Korea, Japan and Malaysia will fight for the honours.
It may be necessary to recall here that the Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) has opted to drop a few of senior players in order to test the fresh blood in the event. The names of World’s highest goal scorer, Sohail Abbas, Rehan Butt and goalie Salman Akbar
were not included in the final list scheduled to leave for China.
Mohammad Imran is currently leading the Greenshirts after Zeeshan Ashraf decided to go on rest for some time. Under his captaincy, the Greenshirts earned silver medal in the Azlan Shah Hockey Tournament held in Malaysia. The skipper also seconded the decision
of the federation saying that victory in the event was not only objective of the national side in the regional gathering.
Imran while speaking to the media stated, “We are not going in to win. Failure in the Asian Games was not an option so we went in full strength. However, the Asian Champions Trophy is not that important and our main task will be to find a good team combination
rather than going for gold.”
In his views, all the participating squads will induct new youngsters in order to prepare for the upcoming mega events including Champions Trophy and Olympic Qualifiers. The omission of the senior names is an ultimate fate and the team would really miss
their services, he added saying that they have no other option to train the youngsters for the future assignments.
He maintained that no player could play forever and they will face a tough time if they do not prepare a backup line. The new inductions were made purely on merit and those were picked up who performed at the junior level, he added.
In the concluding words, he was of the opinion that their main objective was to prepare the team for future tasks.
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