Pakistan set to appear in U18 Volleyball Championship in Iran

KARACHI: Pakistan youth volleyball team was scheduled to fly out of Islamabad for Iran late Friday night to make its debut in the 12th Asian and Oceania Under-18 Volleyball Championship which will be held in Tabriz, Iran, from June 29 to July 6.

In the 18-team event, Pakistan are bracketed with New Zealand and Uzbekistan. The Green-shirts will begin their journey with a match against New Zealand on June 29. They will face Uzbekistan on July 1.Four leading sides of the event will qualify for the World Youth Championship.

This is the first time that Pakistan has formed a youth team, under the supervision of Iranian coach Hamid Movahedi, who has trained the side for eight months along with national junior team which will feature in July in the Asian Under-20 Championship in Manama, Bahrain.

But the Iranian coach is not satisfied with the preparation of his team. “The problem here is that volleyball is started in older age. In Iran normally a kid starts volleyball when he is seven or eight. When I formed Pakistan youth team eight months ago I had to teach the boys the basics of volleyball and that took time,” Movahedi told ‘The News’ on Friday.

“Before Ramadan the boys of the youth side had been granted a 25-day leave for appearing in their examinations. And in Ramadan the boys kept fast and they felt weakness after Iftar which again affected their preparation,” the coach said.

“The situation is very bad. In Peshawar the hall in which we were training was in bad shape. In the last few days we trained in Islamabad but there, too, we were not given Liaquat Gymnasium and we had to practise in Hamidi Hall which is too small,” Istanbul-based Movahedi said.

Squad: Mazhar Ali, Kaleemullah, Nouman Khan, Waleed Khan, Zain Ahmed Jawad, Bilal Anwar, Ihtisham Khan, Mohammad Rizwan, Abdullah, Mohammad Shehbaz, Ahmed Mustafa Khan, Umair Mohammad Ali

Officials: Shahid Masood (manager), Hamid Movahedi (coach), Saeed Ahmed Khan, Wasifullah (both assistant coaches), Armin Golkari (trainer), Ubaidullah Shah (referee).