Azkals to play a friendly match in Barotac Nuevo

This appears in the Thursday May 19, 2011 edition of the Business Mirror.

Azkals to play a friendly match in Barotac Nuevo

by rick olivares

The Philippine Men's Football National Team will be going back to a familiar yet bittersweet place next week as part of their preparations for their World Cup Qualifiers match against Sri Lanka.

The Azkals will spend three days in Iloilo where they will train at Santa Barbara on May 23 before competing in a friendly match with Central Philippine University International School at Barotac Nuevo on May 24. The Centralians, as CPU’s team is called, have mostly Korean players in their lineup.

The last time the national team played in Barotac Nuevo was during the 2008 Asian Football Confederation Challenge Cup Qualifiers where they were unable to advance because of the goal difference of which Tajikistan had a superior goal difference to the Filipinos.

The friendly match will be a homecoming for Azkals Emelio “Chieffy” Caligdong, Ian Araneta, Roel Gener, and Mark Ferrer among others who are all Barotacnons.

The team, which will also have goalkeeper Neil Etheridge in harness, will briefly fly train in Cebu before heading back to Manila for further training.

In the meantime, the Philippine Football Federation announced yesterday that the tickets World Cup Qualifiers for the July 3, 2011 match between the Philippines and Sri Lanka will go on sale on June 3 at all Ticketworld outlets. Tickets to the match which will be held at the Rizal Memorial Football Stadium in Manila will fetch for PhP 200, PhP 300, PhP 2,000 and PhP 3,000. 

To drum up support for the Azkals, the PFF is holding an support event titled "We Believe" at the Trinoma Activity Center on June 10. The event will be a whole day affair and is open to the public. The nationals leave for Germany on June 12 where they will train under the auspices of the German Football Federation (DFB). The team departs on the 26th for Colombo, Sri Lanka.