The Philippines is expected to put up a good fight when it competes in the ASEAN Mitsubishi Electric Cup starting next week.

National men’s football team head coach Albert Capellas said they will make sure to put up the strongest team possible to give other countries a run for their money in this prestigious biennial competition.

The Filipinos will start their campaign against Myanmar on 12 December at the Rizal Memorial Football Stadium.

After the Burmese, the Filipinos will battle Laos on 15 December at the New Laos National Stadium in Vientiane, Vietnam on 18 December at the Rizal Memorial Football Stadium, and Indonesia on 21 December at the Manahan Stadium in Surakarta.

“First, we’ll try to make the squad as strong as possible with the players that we got and we will try to do our best there to try to continue developing the team,” said Capellas, who will miss the services of Santi Rublico and Gerrit Holtmann in the preliminaries due to their pending commitments with their respective clubs in Europe.

“We can get the full potential of the new Philippine national team from now, which we should try to do our best and we will try to, as always we say, to win game by game, let’s see our potential every game.”

The Philippines needs to finish within the top two of Group B to make it to the semifinals of the competitive regional event.

The last time the Philippines made it to the semifinals was back in 2018 when the likes of Phil Younghusband, Stephan Schrock, and Neil Etheridge were on the squad with the late Sven-Göran Eriksson as head coach.

The Philippines lost to eventual titlist Vietnam, 2-4, in the two-legged semifinals.

Philippine Football Federation national team director Freddy Gonzalez admitted that fielding the strongest team possible will not be easy but vowed that they will assess each player to adjust accordingly.