LAHORE, Nov 1: The Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) will offer itself as host to the countries which are included in its pool announced for the AFC Under-17 and Under-20 championships preliminary rounds to be held next year throughout Asia.

The PFF secretary Agha Liaquat Ali told Dawn on Thursday that he would make the offer at the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) meeting to be held at Kuala Lumpur on Nov 23 and 24 in which the secretaries of all the Asian countries would take part to finalise the draws of their respective groups. All the Asian countries have been divided into 11 groups each for these two events.

Pakistan is in group six of the Under-17 preliminary rounds with Turkmenistan and Tajikistan while in Under-20 event Pakistan is in group five with regional countries like Bangladesh, Maldives and Sri Lanka. Both the competitions are to be held throughout Asia from Jan 1, 2002 to June 30. The draws for the preliminary rounds are to be finalised by Nov 30, 2001.

While replying to question, the PFF secretary admitted that Pakistan was not a safe country to hold these competitions under the present situation due to US-Afghanistan war, but it was expected that both the rounds would be held in April or May next year and by that time the situation would have improved.

To a question, Liaquat said that hectic activity programme was ahead of the federation but a preparations plan for these could only be started after the month of Ramzan-ul-Mubarak starting from Nov 17.

Pakistan has to take part in the ninth SAF Games due in March at Islamabad in which an Under-23 team will take part. The national senior team will be competing in the SAARC Gold Cup tournament to be held at Dhaka from Jan 25 to Feb 7. A tour of the Pakistan team to South Africa to play matches against clubs is also being finalised and its proposed dates are also in the month of February. To pick and prepare the team for the Under -17 and Under-20 team is another gigantic task for the PFF.

Liaquat denied the impression that the PFF would face difficulties in preparing teams for all these competitions because it lacked the qualified coaches after losing two English coaches David Burns and John Layton.

“We have best coaches available at local level who can build strong teams for any competition,” the PFF secretary claimed.

He said that the AFC was ready to provide two more coaches to Pakistan but no coach was ready to come to Pakistan due to security reasons.

Regarding the South African tour, he said that the England based company Sephere was organising the tour, but the company was not ready to send its representative to Pakistan to settle different terms and conditions of the tour, due to the present situation prevailing in this region.

However, he said that efforts to materialise the tour were on and he was in constant touch with that company. He said that the English company was also dealing with the Indian Football Federation for South African tour and it was possible that a match between two countries (Pakistan-India) would be included in the itinerary.