KARACHI: The Commonwealth Games-bound Pakistan hockey team takes on Pakistan juniors in the first of the two-match series at the Abdul Sattar Edhi Hockey Stadium here on Tuesday. The match will be played at 8.00am, the officials said.

The series has been planned by the Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) in order to give needed practice to the seniors before they embark to Gold Coast, Australia next week.

The second match of the series between the two outfits will be played on Thursday.

The juniors were also undergoing training separately at the Abdul Sattar Edhi Hockey Stadium for the last couple of days and are in high spirits to give a tough time to seniors.

It may be mentioned that the juniors were pitted against the World XI that visited Pakistan in January and drew the two-match series. Despite losing the first match at Karachi 1-5, the juniors put up resolute performance by holding the experienced World XI to a three-all draw in the secon match at Lahore.

The Pakistan juniors were supposed to tour Argentina last month but the PHF cancelled the trip at the last moment due to financial constraints and to focus more on seniors.

Published in Dawn, March 20th, 2018