These days no foreign hockey team wants to come to Pakistan. In such a situation it seems to be an unwise decision on the part of the Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) to host the inaugural Asian Champions Trophy in summer.

The venue of the tournament will be announced later.

One should be honest in accepting the fact that the law and order situation is not conducive for holding the Asian Champions Trophy in Pakistan.

According to media reports, it was on the PHF's imitative that the AHF's congress, at its meeting held in Kuala Lumpur, welcomed the idea of instituting the Asian Champions Trophy.

The AHF, the controlling body of the game in Asia, also allocated the inaugural trophy to Pakistan of which the PHF is feeling proud. The 2009 Asian Champions Trophy is to be organised on the pattern of the Champions Trophy that is usually contested by top six teams of the world. It means six top hockey nations of Asia will fight for the top honour in the event under discussion.

Pakistan has the unique honour that both the World Cup (1971) and the Champions Trophy (1978) were instituted on the PHF's initiative in the 1970s. But today Pakistan's hockey team is without a major international title. Even at the Beijing Olympics, our team gave a terrible performance by finishing eighth in the 12-nation tournament.

Even at the Asian level Pakistan's performances have been nothing to write home about. Two years ago, we finished third behind South Korea and silver medalist China at the 2006 Doha Asian Games and a year later we were placed seventh in the 2007 Asia Cup held in Chennai. And despite all the tall claims of regaining lost glory by the previous high-ups of the PHF, Pakistan hasn't accomplished anything worth noticeable.

What Pakistan needs is to arrange matches against the world's leading squads as part of the team's buildup process for the Asian Games and the World Cup — both events are to be held next year. Since foreign teams are reluctant to tour Pakistan citing security concerns, our team should play matches on home soil for gaining experience. It would be more rewarding for our players.

Pakistan's top priority should be to asses the potential and capabilities of our players by playing against stronger international teams to remove our shortcomings.

PHF president Qasim Zia, a former fullback, is committed to making the Pakistani team a formidable one. But he was ill-advised to initiate the holding of the Asian Champions Trophy on which million of rupees would be spent. The tournament might not help our team in bettering its competitive skills to overcome formidable international challenges.
If the PHF was interested in getting the honour of introducing the Asian Champions Trophy, it should not have become hosts. It would have been much better if either South Korea or Malaysia, or even Japan, had hosted the event as chances of India and South Korea pulling out of the tournament could not be ruled out.

It needs to be mentioned here that South Korea had joined some other countries to get the 2007 Champions Trophy shifted from Lahore to Kuala Lumpur for security reasons despite Islamabad's assurance of providing high level security arrangements to foreign teams.