Philippine Football: Alive and Kicking!

First off, we wish our men’s national football team, the Azkals, more power—literally—as they battle Mongolia again for the second leg of their duel for the AFC Challenge Cup in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, on March 15.

Their real enemy though is the cold. Beat that, and they’ll cruise to victory since Mongolia is way below the Philippines’ FIFA/COCA-COLA world ranking anyway. The Philippines is at 152nd while Mongolia is at 182nd as of Feb. 2, 2011. Otherwise, they’ll be like Napoleon’s Grande Armée that invaded Moscow, but who were beaten instead and sent home by the bitter Russian winter.

Cold climate makes breathing harder and can cause lung-burns. Battling it is all about acclimatization or simply getting used to it. Thus, our players should have been well-conditioned by then.

Secondly, like any other sport, football can only grow and be sustainable if you have regular competitions. No games, no glory. The more our football players play, the better they will become. That one shining moment we aim for like the World Cup in 2014 in Brazil can only be achieved by long hours of day-to-day rigorous training, unceasing conditioning, and personal discipline.

Thankfully, big bucks are pouring into the Philippine Football Federation (PFF), which oversees our football tournaments in the country. Thus, we welcome the PFF’s new initiatives foremost of which is the upcoming “PFF-Smart National Clubs Championship this year which will serve to revive the national local club competitions in our country and to help in talent identification for various National Football Teams” that it recently announced.

Provincial qualifying rounds for this PFF-Smart National Clubs Championships are scheduled this March, to be followed by group stage eliminations and then regional qualifying rounds in April. The national finals will later be held on June 6-25 in Manila, before the World Cup qualifiers start on June 29.

Thirdly, sustained club competition in the country will mean a wider net for talents to propel our national teams to world class caliber. And that will also mean a cheaper budget since you don’t have to spend more for players with Filipino lineage in foreign leagues. More importantly, you’ll have your players having more time training together rather than for only a few days before a match. You wouldn’t be at their mercy or worry about absences like Goalkeeper Etheridge who won’t be playing in Mongolia.

Verily, one thing quite noticeable during the Azkals’ first match against Mongolia in Bacolod was that while they were individually skillful, they did not gel well enough for an easy 4-0 trumping. There were a lot of miscues and even errors a better opponent would have trounced upon. And the two goals scored were more of individual talent than team play.