July 24, 2007	Tuesday	Rajab 08, 1428

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.

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.

“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.”