LAHORE, June 11: Led by a former Davis Cupper Pawan Kapoor a 25-member squad of Chandigarh Tennis Academy (CTA) arrived here via Wagah border to play matches in different age categories with Punjab Tennis Academy (PTA) in Pakistan-India Punjab Friendship Series.

Among the squad 16 are boys and girls, who will play against their counterparts. Among the remaining nine are veterans and the parents of the players.

The matches will be played at the Punjab Lawn Tennis Association (PLTA) courts in Bagh-i-Jinnah from Monday.

Pawan hoped that their visit would strengthen tennis relations between the two countries and urged upon sports organizations on either side of the border to encourage such visits as he believed it would help a lot to bring people closer.

He also appealed to both the governments to ease the process of visa issuance specially to the sportspersons.

Meanwhile, Rashid Malik said that he would pick best players from his academy like Tanvir Aashiq, Omer Babar, Khurram Nazir, Ahmed Aslam, Khurram Faizan and among girls the best players were Qurat-ul-Ain, Saba Aziz and Zara Ali.

The CTA players:

Boys: Amitabh Singh, Prashant Mehta, Sadeev, Rekha Chandra, Shiven Bali, Rahul Kumar, Rajesh Gadh, Digvijay Singh, Mansimrat Singh, Gagandeep Singh, Birinder Singh.

Girls: Shaleen Chandra, Sonali Bansal, Karan Pataik, Ritu Malhotra and Ripple Bhullar.

Veterans: Pawan Kapoor, Rajesh Gadh, Birinder Singh, Rahul Kumar.