Afghanistan says it wants to win the Asia vs the Caribbean T20 tour­na­ment as part of its prepa­ra­tion for the ICC T20 tour­na­ment in Sri Lan­ka lat­er this month. The un­known Afghanistan play­ers cap­tained by right hand­ed bats­man Nawroz Man­gal will open their cam­paign with a game against host T&T at the Queens Park Oval tonight. The team al­so in­cludes new-ball bowler Hamid Has­san who has made a re­turn to the Afghanistan squad for Sep­tem­ber's World Twen­ty20 af­ter re­cov­er­ing from an in­jury. "Def­i­nite­ly we are here to win and we are con­sid­er­ing it as a very good prepa­ra­tion just ahead of the World Cup"said Shafiq Stanikzai, man­ag­er of the Afghanistan team for the past two years. "So this is go­ing to be very good prepa­ra­tion and we know that T&T is a very tough team we re­spect them high­ly es­pe­cial­ly in T20 for­mat. It will be a tough chal­lenge for us but a very ex­cit­ing one".

Al­so in­clud­ed in the Afghanistan squad are As­ghar Stanikzai and Mo­ham­mad Nabi who put on a spir­it­ed 86 run stand against the mighty Aus­tralians in a friend­ly ODI last month. Aus­tralia won by 66 runs but not be­fore Stanikzai reach a top score of 66. "It's a to­tal T 20 pack­age we have" boast­ed man­ag­er Stanikzai. "We have very good fast bowl­ing at­tack, very good spin at­tack, and we have very good hard hit­ters". Stanikzai says his men are ea­ger­ly look­ing for­ward to play­ing on the same Queens park oval used by West In­dies greats such as world dou­ble record hold­er Bri­an Lara and Vi­vian Richards "This is a huge achieve­ment for every sin­gle play­er be­ing here and com­pet­ing on a ground where Bri­an Lara, Viv Richards or greats of West In­dies have played and rep­re­sent­ed their coun­tries" he told CNC3. Afghanistan com­petes in group A of the ICC T20 and will play In­dia on Sep­tem­ber 19 and Eng­land two days lat­er. This is their sec­ond ap­pear­ance af­ter fin­ish­ing third in group C be­hind South Africa and In­dia two years ago.