Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Bidding for the BIDC Cup

The Cambodian U23 team who'll compete for the BIDC Cup
News is filtering through of the 4-team football competition that will take place at the Olympic Stadium from 8-14 November and will provide the Cambodian Under-23 squad with invaluable match practice in their run up to the SEA Games that get underway in early December. The sponsors are offering a $20k prize for the winners and half that for the runners-up. The BIDC Cup will be sponsored by The Bank for Investment and Development of Cambodia PLC, a Vietnamese Bank. The 4 teams will be the Cambodian and Laos Under-23 teams, as well as two club sides from the Vietnam League, Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) from Pleiku who finished 6th in the V-League this term, and Vissai Ninh Binh, who won the equivalent of the First Division to get promotion to the V-league in the season just ended. HAGL are one of the stalwarts of the V-League, having won league and cup double in 2003 and 2004 and finished 3rd a couple of seasons ago. They also act as a nursery club for Arsenal. The bank which is sponsoring the round-robin tournament was previously known as Prosperity Investment Bank and was bought up a couple of months ago by the Vietnamese sister bank BIDV and renamed. The tournament will also co-incide with Cambodia's 56th anniversary of independence. Meanwhile, the forthcoming SEA Games are keeping everyone busy with a pre-SEA tournament being held in Laos this week involving teams from Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.

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2 Comments:

Blogger Andy Brouwer said...

This is a personal gripe about the administration of football in Cambodia.
Monday was the press conference to launch the BIDC Cup which will be played by the Cambodian U23 team and 3 other teams in Phnom Penh in early November. The press conference was held in PPenh at the Phnom Penh Hotel. You would think that the guy who covers the Cambodian national team and the local professional matches for the main English-language newspaper, the Phnom Penh Post, would get an invite to this press conference. No such luck. The first I hear about it is 24 hours AFTER the event, by word of mouth.
Its not as if the fooball administrators don't know me. I attend all the matches. Sometimes I'm the only reporter at the games. The PPP newspaper gives local football activities a lot of space and coverage. You would think that an invite or even a notification of such a press conference would be forthcoming. Think again. However, I know invites will have gone out to all the Khmer media outlets, newspaper and tv, without any delay.
There's obviously a blockage or problem that needs to be overcome, or else they are very quickly going to alienate the person who is busting a gut to give Cambodian football as much coverage as possible. If I'm not told about these events, how the heck can I report on them. The problem doesn't lie with me. I have already moaned and groaned about this before to the football administrators, but it seems to have made little difference. Apart from knocking on the door of the Federation President, who's also the head of the Military Police, there's not a lot more I can do.
I have made my feelings known again following this latest debacle, but there is a point at which I will give up. If they don't want to help themselves, then so be it.
Andy

October 7, 2009 11:49 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Andy brouwer you do good job for Cambodia football news,i want to kown about my country football!
Good luck with your mission~
Sokmean,cambodia football fan

November 30, 2009 11:09 PM  

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