PHF Executive Board meeting delayed

KARACHI: The Pakistan Hockey Federation’s (PHF) Executive Board meeting would not be held in the last week of July, but sometime in the middle of August, ‘The News’ has learnt.

The Executive Board meeting has been delayed as PHF officials are busying arranging senior team’s training camp and that of the juniors. The next few months would be eventful as far as the hockey activities in the country are concerned, sources in the PHF said.

The sources added that PHF Executive Board meeting was very important because it would discuss all programmes in the country and decide whether to go ahead with them. PHF wants international hockey to be revived this year. It wants to finalise the related things before the board meeting.

All PHF high officials, provincial associations’ secretaries and technocrats will participate in the meeting. The PHF Executive Board will review the expenditure of national competitions and international engagements of senior and junior teams.

PHF is desperate to organize Pakistan Hockey League (PHL) and invite World Hockey Eleven in coming months and work has been started in this regard. The one big goal of making extraordinary security arrangements has been achieved as Pakistan Army has assured the PHF that it would provide security for the proposed events, the sources said.

PHF has contacted world famous players and requested them to visit Pakistan for playing as a World XI. Besides, it has contacted a large number of foreign players to participate in the PHL. When all these details related to the foreign players are finalized, the schedule of these two events will be announced.

The meeting is held every year but this time it will be extraordinarily important because of the visit of World Hockey Eleven and PHL.The national senior team will participate in Asia Cup in October in Bangladesh.

PHF has appointed a new setup for improvement in the senior team. It wants the senior team to play a series with some strong team before appearing in the Asia Cup.