"I don't know my run-up," pace bowler Abraash Khan thought to himself when the Canada Under-19 captain Nitish Kumar threw the ball to him in their opening warm-up game of the 2014 World Cup in Sharjah. Abraash walked back to a point where he felt "this seems about right" and just bowled.
The Canada squad had gone straight to the UAE after months of sub-zero temperatures that did not allow them any outdoor training, said a report by http://www.espncricinfo.com.
There, after just one fielding session and a warm-up match, they were competing against New Zealand.
Abraash, now an allrounder and captain of the side, is the only player from that squad who has made it to this year's U-19 World Cup. He says his team is much better equipped now. The biggest difference, he reckons, is the week-long pre-tournament camp recently held in Sri Lanka. The players washed off their rustiness there before arriving in Bangladesh.
"We lost pretty badly in all games [in Sri Lanka] but nobody was really down about it, we kept getting better," Abraash tells ESPNcricinfo. "In the first game, we bowled around 60 extras. It was the first game after winter and nobody could bowl behind the line."
One of the brightest upcoming talents in Canadian age-group cricket, Abraash was born in Peshawar to Pakistani parents who moved to Canada when he was two years old. He took over the captaincy of the U-19 team soon after the 2014 World Cup and has been relishing it ever since. He says being aggressive, taking responsibility for the team's performances, and his ability to manage older players helped him take to captaincy naturally.
"For my club I would always be captain," he says. "U-15 I was the youngest on the team and captain that year. These kinds of experiences help me develop as a player and person. When you are managing older guys and bringing them together to try and win games, it really helped me out when they made me captain of this team. It's like I've been there before."
When asked who his hero is, he names Imran Khan, who stopped playing international cricket six years before Abraash was born.
"The 1992 World Cup, for a Pakistani that's the biggest thing. It's like the Dhoni scenario - Imran used to bat at Nos. 6-7, and in the final he comes at No. 3 and saves them the game. I just admire that charisma and confidence."
Abraash's Pakistan connections run deep. He was at the National Cricket Academy in Lahore as part of an overseas player programme in 2014 when former Pakistan fast bowler Mohammad Akram, in charge of the academy then, spotted him and asked him to join the nets with some Pakistani players the next morning. Akram, also the head of Pakistan's illegal bowling committee at the time, was working with Saeed Ajmal at the time, and Abraash got to rub shoulders with some prominent international players.
"In Canada someone might say you are very good, but someone in Pakistan might say you are very bad," he says. "One of the questions I had for them was, 'Should I actually pursue cricket professionally, am I good enough?' and the responses I got were pretty positive.
Abraash grew up in Mississauga, close to Toronto, sadi http://www.espncricinfo.com. He did not take to cricket just because he was south Asian. He and his younger brother started playing in the neighbourhood and just fell for it, though cricket was not the only sport he played in a country where ice hockey, basketball and baseball take precedence.
His pace bowling talent was recognised at the Ontario Cricket Academy when he was close to 10 years old, and he was picked for the Canada U-15 squad by the time he was 13. If that rise was not steep already, he became the highest run scorer in his first tournament, despite being picked as a bowler. There has not been a false step since then in a journey he describes as an "easy climb".
Abraash is in grade 12 now and wants to make it to the senior side one day but is realistic and practical. "For me school comes first," he says. "Cricket is fun if you become a professional cricketer - then that's great. But it's really based on a lot of luck and if you get injured and all that. It's not really a secure career, so at school my ambition is to become an engineer or go into medicine. Next year I'll be going to university. But missing a month of grade 12 is tough to catch up on."
He stays in touch with his Pakistani roots and speaks Pashto and Urdu at home. And when he's not at the gym, school, or nets, he finds some time for Pakistani music too.