Kuwait keeping sharp for Azkals

This appears in the Monday July 11, 2011 edition of the Business Mirror.

Kuwait keeping sharp for Azkals

by rick olivares

Around the time that the Philippine Men’s Football National Team will be in Bahrain to play the nation’s Olympic football squad in a pair of friendly matches, their foe in the second round of the Asian Qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup, Kuwait, will try to keep their sabers sharp by playing top competition.

Al-Azraq (The Blues), as the Kuwaiti team is known, have only once will be in Jordan on the 15^th of July to participate in a small tournament that includes the national squads of the host country as well as Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Around the time the Philippines was playing Sri Lanka in Manila, Al-Azraq was in Lebanon where they defeated home national squad 6-0 and played Oman to a 1-1 draw. Against Oman, Al-Ahmar (or The Reds), scored first when striker Hassan Rabia put one passed Kuwaiti netminder Khalid al-Rishidi. But Al-Azraq’s 20-year old wunderkind Yousef Al-Salman equalized in the second half.

Kuwait the 2010 Gulf Champions bombed out of the 2011 Asian Cup when they went 0-3 in Group A action that saw them bracketed with Uzbekistan, China, and Qatar.

“They have two very good strikers in (Al-Salman) and Bader al-Mutwa who can change their game,” said Azkals head coach Michael Weiss. “They have experience and veterans too. They are a tough team that has played a lot of quality opponents. They will be a difficult foe.”

Weiss hopes to keep the Kuwaitis off the scoring board and frustrate them. “We hope that can sneak a goal past them and get a favorable result coming into the home game in Manila (July 28^th),” added the German coach who has been at the helm of the Azkals for six months now.

National Team manager Dan Palami said that he hopes to have the whole team intact for the Kuwait leg. “If not then it’s a possibility that we might see players like Chris Greatwich and Jason de Jong play for us,” said Palami whose massive support for the national team has helped vault them from football “minnows” (in the derisive words of foreign media) to an emerging power.

Left back Ray Jonsson has been unable to suit up for the Philippines owing to injuries in his Iceland club Grindavik. Fil-Dane Jerry Lucena is reportedly set to see action for the Azkals who will be without the suspended team captain Aly Borromeo and midfielder Stephan Schrock due to accumulated yellow cards in the Sri Lanka series.

Kuwait has previously competed for a World Cup slot once and that was way back in 1982 in Spain where they drew one match and lost two. The series against Sri Lanka was the first the Philippines played. The Azkals drew the Brave Reds 1-1 in Colombo before thrashing them 4-0 in Manila.