Brazil in 2014?

LAST SUNDAY I walked into a small barbershop with my son, greeted by a small cheering crowd. The people inside, barbers and customers, were glued to the television watching, not basketball, but football. The Philippine Azkals team was playing against Sri Lanka, and they had just scored their second goal.

The mood in the barbershop remained electric as the Azkals went on to score a third goal, and a fourth goal, and victory, the last one mercifully just as my barber was beginning to give me a shave. The final score was 4-0.

It looks like football is finally capturing the national imagination, and we’ll be seeing more of the Azkals as we go through more “home and away” games.  The next round will see the Azkals playing against Kuwait in that Middle East country on July 23 (the “away” game) while on July 28 the Azkals play against the Kuwaiti team here in the Philippines (the “home” game).

What makes all these matches so important is that they are part of the second round of the Fifa (Federation Internationale de Football Association) World Cup qualifying series.  The games will whittle down the number of countries that will play in the 2014 World Cup, which will be held in Brazil.  If we make it to the World Cup, it will be for the first time in our history.

Besides the large crowd of 13,000 at the Rizal Football Stadium last Sunday, there are many other signs that football might soon become a national obsession. The Sunday televised game was interspersed with numerous ads, from food to pain-killers, featuring Azkal team members. On Monday and Tuesday, morning talk shows were jumping on Azkal team members, with the usual attempts to romantically link them to other celebrities. The Younghusband brothers are clearly a favorite, with the usual questions about whether they plan on becoming young husbands soon, and with whom.

I like this new focus on football. For decades, we have been too fixated on basketball but in terms of international competitiveness, we just don’t have it. It’s more than a height handicap, as I will explain later when I get back to the Azkals.

Then there’s boxing, which glorifies brutality, and is too much focused on individuals.

Latin temperament

Football, I feel, has a better fit with our national temperament. It’s not accidental—because of history and the environment—that we are similar to the Latin Americans in temperament, and that football is so popular in that continent.

The “Latin” temperament is passionate and ebullient, but also modulated by introspection, and constant strategizing.  Basketball brings out the exuberant Filipino but because the court is so small, there’s less of the strategizing and more of diskarte.  Our basketball players convert the court into a stage, into theater often ending up so engrossed with individual performance that they lose sight of team play.

Football channels passion to the crowds of spectators. I can never forget one night in Hanoi some years back when the Vietnamese team won a football match in a stadium and the whole city literally roared with motorcades and street parties well into the night. The passions can run awry, breaking out into brawls among competing fans and even, in 1969, a 100-hour war between Honduras and El Salvador.  The war involved a border dispute but hostilities broke out after a World Cup qualifying game.

But while spectators can get quite wild, there’s something more subdued with the football players themselves, maybe because their playing field is so huge. The skill of the football player lies in their maneuvering around the field, sprinting long distances yet with enough time to stand by, thinking of their next move. While the stars are the ones who make the goals, the crowds also appreciate the other players, guarding the sides or who kick the ball along. There’s less of individual diskarte, and more of team play, than in basketball.

I talked with Neko Lambey, himself a professional football player in his home country of Belize and who is now settled in the Philippines, teaching football to young Filipinos. Neko is gung-ho about the Philippine team, and already has his sights set on Rio in 2014 to cheer our team. But he does have one concern: the fact that our players come from all over means they will have to work harder at building the team spirit. He sees more of this team spirit emerging with each game.

The growing interest in football has to be translated into more support for the sport, from government as well as from the private sector. Our president should meet with and congratulate the Azkals when they have major victories, give them the recognition they need as a Philippine team.

Football culture

Meanwhile, we need to instill a football culture that starts with the young. For years now, football has been identified with the elite because only the larger private schools offer football. That’s slowly changing as the large schools share their football fields with smaller private schools but kids in public schools, smaller private schools and out of school youth are still left out. I have written several times about how our cities and towns give priority to building cockpits rather than sports facilities.  If they do look into sports it’s to make a small basketball court. We need more city and town governments allocating space for football (and baseball).

Now for a bit of the personal touch as I explain my interest in football. It started with my eldest daughter, whose school got her playing football and futsal. (Futsal comes from the Portguese futebol de salao or indoor football.)  I was elated that her school was getting girls to play football, but noticed too, that the sport was giving her a certain ballet-like grace and poise in the way she walked.

One afternoon I happened to bring the kids with me to UP Diliman and I thought we should stop by the Sunken Gardens, where we have football fields. My daughter’s face lit up when she saw the field, with just one student standing there with a football. He was waiting for his friends to arrive for a practice session and graciously offered to lend the football. My daughter very tentatively kicked the ball around, totally enraptured, but that solitary bliss was soon to be interrupted as my other kids, including the youngest, who is 1-1/2 year old, got into the act, ending up with furious chases after the ball.

I vowed to buy our own family football but it took me some time to find one. Even the large sports stores only had basketballs, volleyballs and even American footballs, but no real footballs. I finally found one in a shop dealing with children’s sports in Shangri-La Mall.

Now the kids play football all the time, alone or with siblings and friends, in the community playground, in our garden, garage or, alas, in the living room.