Bogus ages shadow youth soccer

SURABAYA (JP): Booters pretending to be younger than they actually are is a rampant problem at many under-so-and-so soccer tournaments, according to Max Boboy, the man in charge of the All-Indonesia Football Federation's competitions and matches.

Even the Asian Football Confederation is at loss as to how to accurately assess booters' ages, Boboy said. In cooperation with a Japanese university, the confederation has been engaged in research aimed at determining booters' actual ages, but to no avail.

They examined the cartilage in players' fingers and tried to trace age from teeth and hip bones, but in the end it was proved that none of those parts of a human body can accurately determine the age of a person, Boboy said.

Fielding older players is common practice. This happens at the National Coke-Cup Under-15 soccer tournament as well at other junior soccer tournaments in Asia, he said.

"Even school certificates or birth certificates do not always give the right age because they can easily be manipulated at the order of top ranking officials," Boboy said.

"In a Coke Cup tournament a few years ago I once spotted that 11 of the 18 members of the Aceh team came from the same school with their school certificates numbered in sequence," Boboy said.

"But when I asked them about this they refused to acknowledge it. They said they did not know each other. As a result, the man who headed Aceh's education and culture department was fired, upon which he said he was forced to do so by the Acehnese regent," Boboy revealed.

A similar incident also happened with the Jakarta team in the 1992 Coke Cup tournament's qualifying rounds. One of Jakarta's booters used a falsified school certificate to disguise his actual age and the West Java coach knew but kept silent.

Fake certificate

When Jakarta then beat West Java in the following match, the West Java coach used a South Kalimantan friend to tell All- Indonesia Football Federation to check the school certificate of the boy in question, Boboy said.

"The boy had two school certificates, the one stating his real age, another which was fake. But we really did not know that," Jakarta head coach Kunaryo said.

Another case involved Ali Sunan, now striker for West Java's SGS Assyabaab team. He took part in an under-19 soccer tournament in 1988 when he was 19 and had already fathered a son. To make the matter worse, his team won the tournament, Boboy said.

In Asia, it is Thailand which is notoriously skillful at disguising the ages of its players, Boboy said, "I once found out that the Thai team came here with a collective passport which made it difficult, if not impossible, to detect their ages. That's ridiculous, you know. If they did not falsify their ages, why didn't they dare to come with individual passports?"

Players from the Mediterranean countries are no exception. "In an under-15 soccer tournament in Thailand some years ago, our booters, in the same hotel with a United Arab Emirates team, saw their players trying to lure a woman into bed with money. I believe they would not make sexual advances if they were really under 15 years old," Boboy added. (arf)