An official close to the developments in Federal Ministry of Sports said: “Pakistan and China had signed a Memorandum of Understanding in sports in 2008 under which the Chinese government will send coaches to Pakistan.

“Table tennis, swimming, athletics and badminton are few of the sports which will benefit from the training of specialist Chinese coaches.”

The Federal Ministry of Sports wrote to the national sports federations asking them to furnish the Ministry with the requests for their needs.

The official asserted: “The Ministry is there to support the national federations to hire the services of better coaches and physical trainers, which will help the government to arrest the decline in several sports.”

Pakistani athletes could not reach the victory stand in regional and international games including the Olympic and the South Asian Games, mainly due to slackness on the part of the national federation officials, who failed to introduce modern and scientific training despite the passing of several years.However, sports analyst and trainer Amir Bilal criticised the government’s move.

“This is a vital step for the improvement of competitive sports in the country. However, without a well-managed broad based sports activity in educational institutions and community-based clubs, it is not possible to get the required human resource of sports, which should be trained by expert foreign coaches at the highest level.”

Amir, who is also an IOC-certified coach, said: “We will have good Chinese coaches but the language barrier may create perception problems as the interpreters hired to translate training techniques and coaching philosophy usually fail to communicate the required essence.”

He insisted that the management mess of the national sports federations and the sports boards cannot be cleaned without the availability of sports management experts at all levels, which should be the basic concern of the Sports and Education Ministry.