Incheon, South Korea: Captain Mohammad Imran doesn't consider a lack of international competition recently to be any barrier to Pakistan's Asian Games title defense.
Imran tells The Associated Press on Wednesday his team has trained "with the aim of winning the gold medal again" and that the eight-time Asian Games champions have made up for lack of big matches with a lot of practice.
Pakistan failed to qualify for this year's World Cup in the Netherlands, and did not field a team at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow due to a split in its national Olympic association.
The 34-year-old Imran says it is difficult to gauge the disadvantage of not playing in those tournaments, but being the unknown commodity might just help in Incheon.
