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Speaking to Dawn on Thursday, Khawaja Junaid, the team's chief coach, though a little disappointed over the cancellation of the Holland and Belgium tour, said they have come up with alternate plans to help the boys prepare for the Youth Olympics to be held in Singapore in mid August.
“We will now be heading towards Karachi where the boys will be playing matches against the senior and Pakistan Whites teams during the same period that we were to tour Europe,” he informed. “Both these teams are superior to us and I am sure that the boys will benefit from the experience,” he added.
“We usually stop playing a month prior to a big assignment as that is the time for us to work on our shortcomings noticed during a preparatory tour, which we will be doing now as well after playing against the other two national outfits,” he explained.
The junior team, which was training in Islamabad since June 8 was to leave for Europe a day earlier (June 23) but could not due to the delay caused in the issuing of passports to the players.
According to the coach, who recently resumed charge of the junior outfit after a brief stint with the senior side during last month's Sultan Azlan Shah Cup in Malaysia “The boys hail from all kinds of remote areas of the country. Most have never traveled before. Leave alone the passports; some don't even have their 'B' forms with them. So we had to start from scratch to get their papers in order to get them the passports. The visa process, even though the Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) had broken many barriers on the diplomatic front after the senior team's experience with applying for Schengen visas before the World Cup qualifiers in France, giving us the facility to apply just 10 days ahead of travel, took extra time due to the passport problem,” he said.
Once the hassle of 'B' forms was solved by the PHF, the real ages of the boys, too, were found out creating a new headache for the federation as some among them turned out to be too young and some over-age.
