LAHORE: The captain of visiting Maldives cricket team, Muhammad Mehfooz said on Wednesday that their team’s visit to Pakistan will be a big way to learn modern cricket from a much superior side.
“Our tour to Pakistan is of greater significance, not only to prepare for our coming assignment, the ACC trophy in Kuwait but to learn finer points of the game by playing different squads of the host country”, he told reporters after a training session here at National Cricket Academy.
The visiting team is on a 9-day tour to play to play a five match T20 series here against NCA development squad and different team. They will open the tour tomorrow, Thursday with a T20 match at the Aitchison college ground. The visiting team captain expressed his gratitude to Pakistan Government and the Pakistan Cricket Board for hosting them.
“There is a lot of difference between the levels of cricket of Maldives and Pakistan and definitely we will be learning a lot by exposing our players to high quality cricket by playing NCA team and other outfits”, he said.
“Our players are upbeat while in Pakistan and by playing competitive cricket here they will be able to lift the level of their game and to perform better in the ACC trophy which is a very important assignment for them”, he added.
Maldives team’s coach, Muhammad Asif termed NCA a modern institution where state of the art cricket facilities are available under one roof.
“Our team had already visited Sri Lanka but the players are quite impressed to see the facilities at NCA and they feel themselves in a different cricket playing atmosphere compared to Lanka”,he added.
Asif said Cricket structure in Pakistan is based on strong footings and Pakistan is among the top teams of the world. “It is the most conducive atmosphere to learn cricket and I am confident our players will be making best use of their trip to Pakistan”, he asserted.
The visiting team coach claimed that his team will make its presence felt in international cricket by putting up good performance in years to come.
“I cannot give any target or set any date to achieve this objective but I am very confident that my team will give surprise to the teams in the Gulf region”, he added.
“Our tour will help in learning game planning to perform a higher display of cricket which will lead us in is elevating our team’s performance to give tough time to Gulf region teams in future”, he added.
