Azkals unbowed by defeat

By Rainier Allan Ronda (The Philippine Star) Updated December 22, 2010 

MANILA, Philippines - The Philippine Men’s National Football Team came home unbowed by their defeat against Indonesia in their bid to get a finals slot in the AFF Suzuki Cup last week.

Businessman and football team patron Dan Palami, who came home with the team from Jakarta on board a Philippine Airlines flight Monday night, said their “surprise” strong showing in the AFF Suzuki Cup even served to encourage the team to work harder.

Palami, the Azkals’ team manager, said the team is a very young one, having started forming the nucleus late last year and coming up with the current composition sometime middle of this year.

“The teams we faced had played together for three or four or five years. We have just started playing together as a team about a year and we have already attained this level of play that enabled us to give a nice showing in the Suzuki Cup,” he said.

“I think we can rise from this minor setback. We can rise up to the challenge of winning more games, and start to win international tournaments.”

Palami said the Suzuki Cup was just a battle lost, but the war, or the ultimate goal of qualifying for the World Cup in Brazil in 2014, is still up for grabs.

“It’s still a long way to 2014,” he said. “We’ll prepare better and improve to win future international tournaments next year.”

Palami, sans fanfare, had led an effort started last year to find promising football talents throughout the country to make up a rough pool from which to select members of the football team that has now been known as “The Azkals.”

He said the rising popularity of the team was another source of inspiration for the team to win more triumphs for the country.

“We hope that this will continue. We hope that our countrymen will support other sports aside from basketball particularly football where we have a better chance of shining internationally,” he said, noting that the current pool of 30 team members have many “Fil-foreigns” or Filipino-British or Fil-European youths who honed their talent in skills in soccer-crazy Europe where football is even more popular than basketball.

The Suzuki Cup Asean Championship was formerly known as the Tiger Cup until its former backer — Tiger Beer of Singapore — had been replaced by Suzuki Motors of Japan.

The recent string of triumphs of the Azkals is credited to Palami, who had just accepted the post of team manager, upon the plea of the Philippine Football Federation, only in December 2009.

Palami, 40, is the chief executive officer of the Autre Porte Global Inc. (APT Global),a giant railway engineering company involved in the construction, operations, and maintenance of railway systems, and is also involved in various capacities in LRT Line 1 and Line 2 in Manila.

Upon assuming his post, Palami immediately hired a foreign coach to infuse a comprehensive training program. The British coach he hired early this year,Des Bulfin, has recently been replaced with the youthful Simon MacMenemy of England.

“It’s a bit sad that there’s so much obsession here with basketball where we suffer a physical height disadvantage when we can also be world players in football where height is not such an advantage,” he said.

“We can get international recognition with football. Europe and many countries in South America, and even some countries in Asia such as South Korea and Japan are crazy over football and have World Cup fever,” he said.

During the World Cup fever early this year that was hosted by South Africa, the Philippine was just a mere spectator.

“We should have a sustainable football development program where we can spot potential football stars and help them hone their talent,” Palami said. “We need the help of everybody especially schools.”