LAHORE: National Cricket Academy (NCA) director Mudassar Nazar on Thursday said that the ongoing high-performance camp would help in identifying fresh talent which in turn would fill the void in the national team caused by retirement of experienced batsmen Younis Khan and Misbah-ul-Haq.

Talking to the media here, the NCA director said that such high-performance camps had always been helpful in finding new talent.

“Such camps have mostly yielded the desired results in shape of discovering players who have served the national side for a long time,” maintained the NCA director.

“High-performance camps of long duration were organised in 2003 and 2009, and on both occasions it helped in discovering quality cricketers,” Mudassar recalled.

However, he admitted that “it is not easy to find replacements of experienced campaigners like Misbah and Younis.”

Answering a question, he, however, said that sometimes it was easy to get replacements of iconic cricketers while at times it took years to get replacements.

“It is my personal experience based on my involvement with the previous camps held in 2003 and 2009 that we have been able to find very good players who served the national side for quite a long time,” remarked the NCA director.

Also, he said it was not fair to conclude that the team having succeeded in the Champions Trophy was fully balanced.

“Getting complacent after clinching trophy in a major tournament is in no way a good sign since there is a lot of work to be done with the national side ahead of the future international events,” commented the NCA director while stating that team-building was a continuous process wherein players were replaced.

Mudassar said the high-performance camp will help in improving the standards of the domestic cricket. “When participants of the camp will feature in the national tournaments other players will be learning from them,” he added.

Answering another question, he said efforts are being made to strengthen the pace attack of the national side by giving special attention to pace bowlers.

“We have a few young pacers in our national U-16 and U-17 sides who are very quick but we have to wait for them to blossom,” he further said.

“We discovered a few high-quality cricketers during a tour of our ‘A’ team which, I believe, is a success,” he added.

“We really need to pay attention to our junior teams in order to groom our new talent,” remarked the NCA director, stating: “It takes a lot of time and effort to find cricketers who could serve the game for quite a long time.”

Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2017