Bogus ages shadow youth soccer

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)