Give And Go
By Michael Angelo S. Murillo
Dropping to its second defeat in as many games in the FIBA Basketball World Cup in China on Monday, Gilas Pilipinas has been eliminated from the running and relegated to the classification side of the global hoops spectacle.
And while it is totally not surprising considering the kind of competition the Philippine men’s national basketball team is up against in the Worlds, still to see Gilas get bamboozled the way it has had in the tournament — with an averaging losing margin of 52.5 points — is in equal parts saddening and disconcerting.
No doubt basketball in the Philippines in large part has significant grown throughout the years but the ongoing World Cup has been an eye-opener that vis-à-vis the rest of the world we still are a long ways to go to being truly at par with the best in the sport.
In Asia we are holding our own all right. Outside of it? Our game against Italy and Serbia pretty much answers that.
That being said, may the hard lessons of the 2019 World Cup not go unnoticed to each and everybody basketball stakeholder in the land.
Be it the need to have a more ample time to prepare or developing the “right” players for the job and giving them the proper exposure or crafting a sustainable and long-term basketball program, something has to happen because obviously what we have right now is not making the cut.
Sure it will take a long time. In our case may be a very long time. But it is something that has to happen if we are to further grow and in keep step with the rest of the world in terms of hoops.
Every nation goes through that. Heck even the Americans, long considered the barometer in the sport, have had to go through such “recalibration” in different junctures to keep the kind of stature they have.
Our Asian and Oceania neighbors — China, Japan, Korea, Chinese-Taipei Iran, Australia and New Zealand — went and still going through it and it is about time we do some fine-tuning of our own.
We may be out of the running for the higher rounds but our World Cup campaign is not over and there are still games left to be played, beginning with our final Group D assignment against Angola today.
May Gilas use these remaining games to build up and learn further moving forward.
Still believe in the team and what it wants to accomplish. Laban lang Pilipinas!
Michael Angelo S. Murillo has been a columnist since 2003. He is a BusinessWorld reporter covering the Sports beat.
