Nepal on Tuesday announced a 25-member preliminary squad for the upcoming ICC Twenty20 World Cup Asia Regional Finals.

Only one team from the five-nation tournament will qualify for the 2019 ICC Twenty20 World Cup Global Qualifiers to be held on October and November this year. The regional qualifiers are slated for July 20-28 in Singapore. Apart from hosts Singapore and Nepal, other teams include Kuwait, Malaysia and Qatar.

United Arab Emirates, who were supposed to play in this Qualifier, earned an automatic berth for the Global Qualifier by the virtue of being the organiser. A total of six teams from Global Qualifier will make it to the 2020 ICC Twenty20 World Cup to be held in Australia.

Paras Khadka, Abinash Bohora, Amit Shrestha, Basant Regmi, Bhim Sharki, Binod Bhandari, Dipendra Singh Airee, Gyanendra Malla, Jitendra Mukhiya, Karan KC, Kushal Bhurtel, Lalit Bhandari and Lalit Narayan Rajbanshi made the cut for the preliminary squad. The cricketers were picked up following their performance in the recently concluded Prime Minister One-Day National cricket tournament and other national and international tournaments.

The team was picked up by an independent selection committee headed by ICC representative Aminul Islam, newly-appointed coach Umesh Patwal and Khadka. Other players in the preliminary squad included Aarif Sheikh, Nandan Yadav, Pawan Sarraf, Pradeep Airee, Raji Rijal, Rohit Kumar Paudel, Sandeep Lamichhane, Shahab Alam, Sharad Vesawkar, Sompal Kami, Sundeep Jhora and Sushan Bhari.

The final 15-member squad for the Regional Finals will be announced after the closed-camp which kicks off from Thursday. The Regional Finals is going to be Patwal’s first assignment as Nepali team head coach after he took over the reins on June 10 in a one-year contract. He was believed to be the man behind Nepal’s maiden One-Day and T20 International bilateral successes in the UAE in January-February this year.

Patwal was working as the batting consultant of the national team then. Right on the day he landed in the country, the Mumbai coach had said his major target would be to give Nepal a second appearance in the Twenty20 World Cup. Nepal’s maiden appearance in the Twenty20 World Cup came in 2014 in Bangladesh where they impressed the world with their cricketing prowess.

They went on to miss the 2016 edition following a torrid campaign in the British soil in 2015 and from there on, the premier event of the ICC was made a four-year tournament.