Chitwan Tigers on Monday named former U-19 team skipper Prithu Baskota as their captain for the upcoming Everest Premier League (EPL) Twenty20.

The six-team city-based franchise cricket tournament is scheduled to begin from December 18 at the Tribhuvan University Stadium grounds. Under Baskota, Nepal had played the 2012 ICC U-19 World Cup in Australia, while he also helped Nepal win the ACC U-15 and U-17 Elite Cup titles.

Tigers are the franchise of IDS Group Pvt Ltd and have Dipendra Singh Airee as their marquee players. Anil Mandal, Lalit Singh Bhandari and Dilip Nath are other national players in the Tigers squad. Mandal, who initially went unsold in the EPL auction, has replaced Subash Khakurel after the national team wicketkeeper withdrew his name due to injury.

Khakurel was instead named the manager of the Tigers, while Kalam Ali is the bowling coach and Dipendra Chaudhary is the batting coach. Baskota said he was looking forward to get his team into a good position in the tournament.

“We are probably one of the youngest teams in the EPL and expecting to do good with the current set of players. We will go match by match and look to finish at the top of the table,” said Baskota who is expecting to get decent foreign players in their squad.

According to the tournament regulations, every team needs to have three international recruits in their squad. IDS Group President Kishor Bhattarai said he is looking forward to rope in some good players from India. “We had initially wanted to get players with IPL experience but they were not given NOCs by their respective franchises,” said Bhattarai.

“Now we are in talks to bring in cricketers who have experience of playing in the Ranji Trophy. Two of those players are now featuring in the IPL from this season. We believe that the mixture of our youth team and players with international experience give us good results,” added Bhattarai.