THE Philippines lost to Wales, 1-0, on Wednesday (Thursday Philippine time) to open up the women’s football team’s campaign in the 2023 Pinatar Cup.
Kayleigh Green scored the lone goal of the match on a penalty in the 45th minute for Wales.
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The loss was nevertheless a respectable result for the Filipinas, ranked 21 places below the Welsh (32nd).
The Filipinas kept withing striking distance, with goalkeeper Olivia McDaniel coming through with crucial saves in the second half even without striker Sarina Bolden and midfielder Jaclyn Sawicki.
“We don’t like losing and we’ve spoken about that before but I’m really pleased with what we did tonight,” said Philippines coach Alen Stajcic. “There are usual issues of not being able to keep the ball better which is something we have to work on.”
“Considering that we’re in pre-season and the opposition right in the middle of their season, the jetlag, we’ve had delayed flights, we’ve had players ill and we’ve had players coming in really late to camp, that was an amazing effort – probably one of our best in terms of effort. We went up against players in the super league and some of the big clubs as well so it was a really good effort and the team showed a lot of discipline defensively,” said Stajcic.
Still, Stajcic said giving up the penalty would have to be addressed as the Filipinas continued their build-up for the World Cup set in New Zealand in September.
“It’s the fourth or fifth penalty we’ve given away a penalty and we’ve got to learn on those kinds of things but apart from that I thought we did really well. Dom (Randle) herself had a strong game defensively,” said Stajcic.
“First and second half we worked extremely hard against an opponent that only missed out on the World Cup from UEFA, the strongest continent in women’s football. We played against a match-hardened team. We missed Sarina and Jackie who just came in and unavailable for today. A lot of things to look forward in the next week and hopefully we can freshen the squad up for Game 2 and see how we go against Scotland who are as good as a team or even better (than Wales),” said Stajcic.
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