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A Pakistan 'A' team will visit Sri Lanka on a three-week tour next month, official said. The team will tour between the second week of June and first week of July during which it will play three four-day games and as many limited overs matches, the director of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Brig Munawwar Rana said.

Rana said players currently under guidance as Lahore's National Cricket Academy would be considered for selection while admitting that there would be no age restricts. He said all the youngsters who have either excelled for the junior teams or those who have performed at the domestic front, have been taken under the fold of the academy.

But he left the option open while saying any other player with an excellent record would definitely be considered for selection. Pakistan's junior string last visited Sri Lanka in the early part of 2000 when the Under-19 team participated in the Youth World Cup. The team finished as losing semi-finalists.

Rana said the itinerary of the tour would be finalist soon which would confirm the venues and the dates. He, however, agreed that the tour would be a tight one because in three weeks, the team would have 17 days of competitive cricket.

In the recent past, the PCB has rightly started giving importance to youth cricket. Last month, a junior team visited Kuala Lumpur for a four-match series while before that, another youth team took part in the ICC junior tournament at Dhaka, Bangladesh. Pakistan's present crisis of not having skill-ful and polished youngsters to replace the ageing veterans is chiefly because the youth cricket programme has been abruptly halted a couple of days ago.

The emphasis on youth cricket provided Pakistan current multi-talented players like Waqar Younis, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Saeed Anwar, Mushtaq Ahmad and Moin Khan etc who were in the same batch of players who played together at the junior level a decade ago.

© Dawn