Iqbal Qasim to head junior selection committee

The Pakistan Cricket Board today announced a national junior selection committee, whose immediate task will be to select the national Under-19 team for next month's World Cup in Bangladesh.

Iqbal Qasim, the former Test spinner, was appointed head of the committee, while the other three members are Abdul Raqib, Azhar Khan and Maazullah Khan. They will hold a preliminary meeting this Thursday (January 15) and will then supervise trials with the 27 probables who have already been picked.

All the participating teams in the World Cup have been advised by the ICC to hand in their 14-man squads by January 15. However, the PCB today requested the ICC to extend its deadline until January 18, arguing that the new committee had only just been formed and hence would now require more time to hold trials and deliberate on selection.

The PCB submitted a provisional squad of 28 players to the ICC last month. After tests for age verification were carried out at the Shaukat Khannum Memorial Hospital last week, one boy was found to be over 19 and was, thus, disqualified from the trials.

The selected players will continue to attend the training camp at the national academy at Lahore. The camp will break on January 31 for Eit-ul-Azha, a religious festival, and will resume in Karachi on February 5.

The 27 players in the trials are: Sohail Ahmed, Jahangir Mirza, Adnan Akmal, Atif Ijaz, Salman Qadir, Zulqarnain Haider, Wahab Riaz, Abid Ali, Ahmed Nasim, Sakhawat Salamat, Shahid Yousuf, Bilal Azmat, Mansoor Amjad, Tariq Mahmood, Adnan Zaheer, Usman Saeed, Fawad Alam, Khalid Latif, Khurram Manzoor, Uzair-ul-Haq, Naeem Ahmed, Mohammad Altaf, Imran Pasha, Riaz Afridi, Hidayatullah Khan, Asif Iqbal,Yasir Arafat.