The players selected for the training are Paras Khadka, Gyanendra Malla, Sarad Vesawakar, Anil Mandal, Binod Das, Mahesh Chhetri, Mehboob Alam, Basanta Regmi, Amrit Bhattarai, Shakti Gauchan, Bindo Bhandari, Bhuwan Karki, Rahul Bishwakarma, Pradip Aire, Prithu Baskota, Fajlur Rahman, Krishna Karki, Sanjam Regmi, Sagar Pun and Avinash Karna.[break]
The tournament will be the first test for the newly appointed coach Pubudu Dassanayake. The team will start the close camp training from Friday.
This is the first time Nepali senior team is participating in the international tournament after 16th Asian Games held in Guangzhou, China on October.
Naresh Budhayer is the only player left out of Nepali squad which participated in the Asian Games. Budhayer had scored the highest 232 runs for Nepal in course of its qualification for the U-19 World Cup a couple of months earlier.
Similarly, Pradip Aire who was ruled out of the Asian Games at the last moment following injury has been called in.
According to Bijay Sharma, the coordinator of the national selection committee, the players were selected on the basis of their performance during T20 National Tournament and U-19 World Cup qualifiers.
"Despite the willingness of selection committee we could not call a couple of more players. We have submitted a list of 30 players to coach Dassanayake so that he can see the performance of more players. But he did not wish to put more than 18 players in the camp. He agreed to include 20 players for the closed camp upon our request."
Regarding Budhayer, who has been dropped, Sharma said, "Budhayer is a player with high potential. But he still has opportunity as he is U-19 player."
Along with host Nepal, UAE, Hong Kong, Afghanistan, Qatar, Oman, Malaysia, Kuwait, Bhutan, Maldives and Saudi Arabia will compete in the ACC T20. Other than Afghanistan, top three teams will get chance to compete in the global World Cup T20 Qualifiers to be held in UAE in March.
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