LAHORE: Pakistan hockey skipper Zeeshan Ashraf, has reiterated that he will consider every match of the World Cup qualifiers seriously to ensure that Pakistan qualify for next year’s mega event.

Speaking to the media, at the National Hockey Stadium (NHS) where the national training camp concluded on Saturday, Zeeshan said though many teams of the qualifiers seemed to appear as mediocre, underestimating them as easy outfits would be a blunder and every player must play to his full potential to achieve victory in each and every match.

The qualifiers are scheduled to be held in, Lille France from Oct 31 to Nov 8 in which besides the hosts, Pakistan, Japan, Russia, Poland and Italy are competing.

Only the winners of the round will qualify for the World Cup to be held in India in February next year.

Zeeshan, added that with the induction of senior players like Rehan Butt, Sohail Abbas, Waseem Ahmad the team seems to be strong but needs to work hard at all levels, seniors as well as juniors to achieve their goal.

He specified that team morale was also high with the availability of the senior players and expressed his hope that Sohail Abbas would fare well as his performance could make a clear difference.

He went on to explain that the boys had undergone rigorous training in the recently-concluded training camp and consistent and effective efforts were made to bring about improvement in short-corner conversion and defence as well.

Zeeshan pointed out that although the weather would be cold in France, the team was going one week earlier to enable the players to acclimatise themselves to the conditions there.

However, he lamented that the delay in getting visas of France had deprived the team of playing some practice matches before the start of the event.

The Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) had planned a European tour from Sept 24 prior to the qualifiers but they received the visas only this week which forced them to cancel the visit to Poland and Belgium.

Meanwhile, former Olympian and coach Khawaja Zakauddin, who also came to the stadium to see the preparations said the team had five swift forwards who were quite capable of scoring a good number of goals.

He said the team was in a position to qualify for the World Cup as the qualifiers were not very tough.

He said though France would be playing in its homeland and Japan had improved its standard of the game, they were still not world-class sides.

However, he said Pakistan should concentrate on attacking hockey and it should try to score maximum goals in every match.

He also urged Sohail Abbas to play his due role in earning big-margin victories as it would raise the morale of the team for the main round.

He said the weather would not create much problems and it would not be that severe in the month of November, despite being windy occasionally.

The team is leaving for France in the wee hours of Sunday from Lahore.

Pakistan, the top ranked team of the event with a world ranking of seventh will take on lowest team Italy, which is 26th in the ranking, in the opener on Oct 31.

The next day it will play against Russia, which is ranked 23rd and in the third match hosts France (17th) will be the rival on Nov 3. Japan, ranked 14th, will be facing Pakistan on Nov 5. In the last league match Poland, another weak side with a ranking of 22nd, will be facing Pakistan on Nov 7.

The positional matches will be played on Nov 8.

Team
Goalkeepers: Salman Akbar and Nasir Ahmad.

Full-back: Zeeshan Ashraf  (Captain), Sohail Abbas and Mohammad Imran.

Halves: Mohammad Irfan, Wasim Ahmad, Sajjad Anwar, Fareed Ahmad and Muhammad Rashid.

Forwards: Rehan Butt, Shakeel Abbasi, Abdul Haseem Khan, Abbas Haider, Akhtar Ali, Waqas Sharif, Shafqat Rasool and Mohammad Zubair.