Philippines catches World Cup fever

MANILA, Philippines — Shirts are selling briskly, crowds pack sports bars to watch matches and football is front-page news. Whisper it quietly, but basketball-crazy Philippines has finally been afflicted by World Cup fever.

For decades, the nation of more than 100 million was on a very short list of global locations that had failed to fall for the beautiful game.

That is beginning to change as football’s narrow, but passionate, Filipino following grows fueled by success of the national team whose new coach is former England great Terry Butcher — a World Cup semi-finalist with the Three Lions in 1990.

“Definitely, we do have… World Cup fever,” television sportscaster Bob Guerrero told AFP outside a Manila bar where he was watching France knock Argentina out of the global tournament.

“We’re hoping that it’s going to be a snowball effect and football will really start to grow here in the Philippines,” said Guerrero, who works for top TV network ABS-CBN who are airing World Cup matches live.

Grow it may, but at the moment there are only an estimated 1.5 million football-playing Filipinos compared to figures claiming that some 40 million regularly flock to the basketball courts that populate every barangay (borough) across the archipelago.

It’s a love affair that goes back to the 1900s when the Americans introduced basketball. Rather than reject the pastime of their colonial masters, Filipinos made it their own.

It became part of the curriculum in schools and since then Philippine squads have played respectably on an international level. Basketball’s governing body FIBA has them ranked 30th out of 159 nations, just behind China.

But, until recently Philippine love and prowess in hoops was missing from their football team, a gap evident even in the nicknames of the respective squads.

The Philippines basketball team are dubbed the “Gilas,” the local word for elegance, while the football team are called the “Azkals” which is a slang term for stray dogs.

“When I arrived, the football community was very small,” said Azkals captain Phil Younghusband, who made his debut in 2009.

“You can probably count in the hundreds the people who were aware of football and playing football.”

The former youth player with English Premier League club Chelsea is one of a wave of photogenic foreign-based players of part-Filipino parentage recruited by the Azkals.

In a few short years they have vaulted the team to qualification for the Asian Cup for the first time, and in May they hit their highest ever FIFA ranking of 111th in the world.

That success comes on the heels of the launching last year of the country’s first pro-league, the Philippines Football League, which added to the momentum.