Filipinas coach want equal opportunity for local, foreign players

MANILA, Philippines – Philippine women’s national football team head coach Mark Torcaso is looking to even the playing field between local and foreign based players in the national team pool after holding a training camp at the Rizal Memorial Stadium earlier this week.

In an effort to identify the next generation of local talent, Torcaso invited a good mix of veteran, returning and new players to make up a 30-woman squad in the days-long training camp. But more than having an eye for new talent, it was also about offering Philippine-based players more opportunities.

With the local football scene still needing work to sustain an established calendar of play, the main goal is also to raise the standard of play here at home.

“I think it’s just important to acknowledge and recognize that we need to get older players on a good level. There shouldn’t be a comparison of local players and foreign players -- we should just be picking the best players possible. And if players come from here, or they come from overseas, they come from there,” said Torcaso as the team’s local camp concluded at the Rizal Memorial Stadium on Friday. 

“We just pick the best players that we can but we just want to bridge the gap between the training sessions and the resources sometimes that the players get here to be as good as what some of the girls gain in professional clubs in Europe and that’s what we’re trying to do constantly.”

The camp was held during a time that is not a FIFA window, which meant that a lot of the foreign-based players were unable to join because of their club commitments. But even then, Torcaso said that he wanted to work on the players who were available.

With a couple of tournaments slated later this year, Torcaso wanted to widen his horizons – as he also invited a number of youth players to the senior camp.

Even if the core of the FIFA Women’s World Cup team is still intact, the Aussie coach is getting ready for the next generation.

“This is the first stage of it, [preparing for the future] — is making sure we have a large pool of players, we have as many players as possible to pick from and we’re not gonna leave any player unturned or unavailable, we wanna have