Twenty20 Cup will be no festival
LAHORE, July 23: Pakistan
captain Shoaib Malik on Monday disagreed with his Australian counterpart
Ricky Ponting’s recent statement that they will be treating September’s
Twenty20 World Championship as a festival.
Talking to reporters at the end of the second phase of the Pakistan fitness
training camp at Gaddafi Stadium, Shoaib pointed out that like other forms
of cricket Twenty20 was also a competitive version of the game and, unlike
Ponting’s opinion of it, Pakistan would like to tackle it with full effort
and top squad. |
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Malik, who replaced Inzamam-ul-Haq as skipper
following the World Cup debacle early this year, said that he was taking the
first edition of the Twenty20 Cup very seriously and a victory in the event will
be a huge boost for his team.
“We need to win in such a high profile competition to raise the team’s morale
before facing South Africa, India and Australia in back-to-back series later
this year,” he said.
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“To improve the
fitness levels of the players we held this training camp under extreme
conditions and hopefully the boys have achieved maximum success as far as
fitness is concerned,” he said.
Shoaib, however, sounded a little concerned about the low scoring games at
the training camp but added that the main purpose of the camp was to improve
the fitness level which would hopefully improve the overall graph of the
team. |
“In fact, the third phase of the camp at
Karachi (from July 27) will help the players to hone their skills for the
Twenty20 matches. We will be playing 12 matches there and I do hope every match
will be a high scoring one,” he said.
He also denied reports that Mohammad Yousuf and
Abdul Razzaq would be left out of the Twenty20 World Championship squad. “No
such decision has been taken yet and a balanced team will be announced for the
event.”
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