Tougher battles await
Come September. This is not a reference to a film of the late 1950s but to the string of sporting events now in progress in Jakarta, which are dominating the news in local papers. Apart from hosting the 29th Asian Under-19 Soccer Championship from Sept. 11th to the 25th, in which young booters from ten Asian countries compete for the trophy, Jakarta is also host to three other major international events.
Of all those sporting events, however, it is expectedly the soccer competitions which seem to get the most attention from the public and the press. Soccer is, after all, still the number-one sport in Indonesia. In the week-long soccer matches, a competition to select the two leading teams to represent Asia in the World Junior Championships in Lagos, Nigeria, next year, Indonesia is being represented by twenty tightly selected players who are still in their late teens.
This team was established as part of an ambitious US$1.2- million project aimed at preparing a world-class team to represent Indonesia, hopefully, in the potentially Asian hosted 2002 World Cup finals. And indeed, it was a promising start for the young booters when they met their opponents from Qatar, one of the better soccer teams of the Persian Gulf area. Right until the final whistle, the boys managed to play the ninety minutes of the game without showing any serious fatigue, which surely is more than can be said of their seniors representing this country in the last few decades.
Pundits and critics, after watching the first match, had high hopes for the players. Many of them believed that the young booters held the promise of eventually becoming a strong national team capable of winning the respect of other teams in this region, like their seniors were in the 1960s and 70s.
But soccer competitions, which are always capable of inspiring strong sentiments, have in many cases turned into a boomerang when a national team takes on a foreign team and loses. This, unfortunately, was the case in the recent game. Trounced 0-4 by a better and stronger Syrian team, fans who were formerly so proud of their home team suddenly reversed their support and started jeering. The possible reason for the defeat is that, before they were fielded in the present competition, the youngsters had been undergoing a strenuous 12-month training stints in Italy, one of world's soccer powerhouses.
Other teams, especially those coming from Gulf countries such as Qatar, Iraq, Kuwait and Bahrain, were preparing themselves better for such events by inviting world-rated coaches from Latin American and European countries to run their teams. It is therefore not too surprising that those Gulf countries often have teams that are stronger than that of their current host. For one thing, those Gulf countries can afford to spend more money to realize their ambitions of building a reputable soccer team -- if possible, a team that will be among the best in the world. Countries such as South Korea, Japan and Thailand are also coming up with teams that are hard to beat.
It should by now be obvious that the one-year training stint in Italy was not enough for the Indonesian youngsters to challenge their better and stronger opponents. Still, it should be kept in mind that one defeat against Syria does not mean the end of the world, either for Indonesia or for the young booters. Actually, they did show strong potential for future greatness, but they can only realize this greatness if we are willing to give them the opportunity to grow.