Scotland captain Charlie Peet says his team are looking to take inspiration from their senior counterparts ahead of the ICC Under 19 Men’s Cricket World Cup starting this week.

The Scots begin their campaign on Friday against Sri Lanka in Guyana, before also taking on the host nation West Indies and Australia.

Peet’s team may only have been at the World Cup as a late replacement for New Zealand, who withdrew over quarantine issues, but the skipper believes Scotland can once again impress on the international stage.

He said: “The senior team are obviously a huge inspiration for what they did at the T20 World Cup [making the Super 12s].

“Quite a few of our guys play with and rub shoulders with the first team quite a lot, so to see them put in those sorts of performances against the best teams in the world gives us the inspiration to think that we can do the same.”

The left-arm spinner also revealed that, while his team are raring to go now preparation is complete, the news on their participation took a while to sink in.

He added: “It was obviously a pretty big surprise for us to find out we’d qualified when we were all extremely disappointed with the way the qualifiers turned out. It was quite surreal when we were told, it didn’t really sink in for a while.

“But after that we got straight back into training and we had a good couple of tough months at the indoor centre.”

Unlike Scotland, who were at the 2020 tournament, Uganda are at their first U19 Men’s Cricket World Cup in 16 years, after last qualifying for the 2006 edition in Sri Lanka. They are in a tough-looking group B alongside India, Ireland and South Africa, but will be desperate to make an impact after so long away from a major finals.

Captain Pascal Murungi says his team’s performance levels and overall development, is just as important as their results. He believes just to have the experience of a World Cup is already a huge success.

“For us every game will be like a final,” Murungi explained. “We’ll try to give the best of ourselves. It is not about us saying ‘we have to win two games or it’s a failure’. Our mind-set is totally different, but we just want to show what we can do.”

Although his team lost to Scotland in their final warm-up game the performance-levels didn’t concern the Ugandan skipper.

He added: “That was a warm-up game and we were trying a few different strategies, it was all part of the final preparation. I think now we are ready to deliver our best over the next few weeks. We just want to get the best out of ourselves I believe we can do that.”

Meanwhile, Papua New Guinea suffered a 250-loss to an impressive UAE side in Monday’s warm-up match. But their captain Barnanbas Maha is hopeful his team will be better for the experience.

He said: “We were a bit rusty after travelling. But we are here to learn and compete. And I think we can learn a lot from that match and hopefully prepare ourselves for the Pakistan game (on Saturday).”