Sports
Philippines stuns New Zealand for first-ever World Cup win
AUCKLAND, New Zealand — One short decade ago, the Philippines women’s national team was a certified soccer minnow. It trained in mismatched kits on chewed-up fields and often didn’t even qualify for qualifying tournaments. It exited the 2013 Southeast Asian Games with zero goals scored and nine conceded to Vietnam and Myanmar. It soon went idle for over a year, without a coach, amid allegations that stolen credit cards were used to book players’ plane tickets.
All of that, and more, was the context for a stunning Women’s World Cup upset Tuesday: Philippines 1, co-host New Zealand 0.
It framed the joyous tears and unbridled celebrations that greeted the final whistle.
Goalkeeper Olivia McDaniel punted the ball skyward, then cried.
Goalscorer Sarina Bolden, flanked by teammates, streamed onto the field in ecstasy.
And in Illinois, at around 2:30 a.m., the team’s original architect, Butchie Impelido, went bonkers.
Impelido, a Chicagoland IT worker, never set out to build a World Cup team when he persuaded his eldest daughter, a Filipino American college student, to try out for the Philippines national team in 2005.
But over the coming years, he helped build a Pinay pipeline. It pulled hundreds of Filipina American girls to Southern California for tryouts. Together, they transformed an underfunded, overmatched team into a first-time World Cup qualifier — and now a first-time World Cup winner.
“Staggering,” head coach Alen Stajcic said, summing up a famous night and an arduous journey. “Miraculous. … Mind-blowing.”
Impelido, a Philippines-born U.S. immigrant, still remembers the early days, in the 2000s, when the team would train on choppy grass fields and often share them with track-and-field athletes. “You had to make sure the javelin players are not throwing,” he told Yahoo Sports with a laugh. “You could see the holes on the field.”
Now, he’s seeing history.
He also still remembers scouring nascent websites and message boards, such as usapangfootball.proboards.com, where in 2012 he found Mark Mangune. Mangune, a soccer obsessive who’d moved from Davao City to Michigan as a little boy, would post lists of Filipina American prospects, which Impelido forwarded to the Philippines Football Federation. The PFF then made Mangune a volunteer “liaison and recruitment officer.” He’d cold-call college coaches, inquiring about players’ Filipino heritage, and DM prospects on Instagram after mundane days at his telecommunications job. He’d invite them to the California tryouts — and in the early days, many would ignore him; some suspected a prank.
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