Thursday, September 03, 2009

Cambodia splash cash in bid to climb rankings

Thu Sep 3, 2009

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Cambodia are fleeing their swampy, flood-plain national training centre and will splash out on a high-tech soccer facility.

The Southeast Asian strugglers will fork out $5 million on new facilities to raise the standard of soccer in the impoverished country and catch up with their regional neighbours after decades of mediocrity.

"If we want to compete with other countries in the region, we need to develop players and that requires us to have better training fields," Ouk Sethycheat, secretary-general of the Football Federation of Cambodia, told Reuters on Thursday.

The new centre in Takeo, about 40 km outside Phnom Penh, will have a match stadium, three training surfaces, medical facilities, accommodation for players and a reservoir to ensure a water supply for irrigating the fields.

An initial investment of $1.2 million will be made, Ouk Sethycheat said, provided by local companies and soccer's world governing body FIFA, as well as money from the sale of the old training facility, which was heavily waterlogged after rains.

Cambodia have never won a soccer tournament and are ranked 171st among FIFA's 208 member countries.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"from the sale of the old training facility"?

Sounds like a familiar plan. What else is news these day? There should be a standard soccer field in every province in Cambodia. No need to sell the old one, which sits on a prime location.

The govt will collect multi million dollars from the old stadium, and they beat up and evict the poor in the name of national facility.

Duh!

Anonymous said...

It is insane enough to cast bad image on old landmark Olympic stadium for greed. And now a new plan in Takeo. Only a fool trust this expenditure and its management.KhOpen,

Anonymous said...

Dear all,

Now, we should wake up and identify who we are because individual or interest group who created this English website (KI media)in which almost information provided only in favor of oppositition party, but it is not so helpful to the public interest in terms of sensibility, creativity, contructivity, productivity, and neatral judgement. If u say that Cambodia is not a demoncratic country, u a 100% wrong.

By the way, if u say that the demoncracy in Cambodia is not fully applied or partially carried out, of course your idea or judgement is sensible and valuable. But, it is still acceptable because Cambodia case is not as the same as other countries cases, we need sometime to make change.

If were u, anyway, I may be very shame due to the fact that information provided is only attacked individual person that lead to conflict of interests (your own problem). My suggestion is that u should provide fair and neatral information that would help our country and people. Especially; foreigners shall not be able to look down our nation due to the fact that we a in unique unity. Why? Because it does not matter even we fight with each other. We attack just in the purpose of progress and future develpment of ow own nation. If we try to attack individual, we can not change because of conflict of interest between supporters and oppositors. We can achieve a goal and do thing change unless we break difference and combine into commond interest,goal and vision.

We should learn from the past experiece, we lost when we broke, we won when we united.

From Thana
I am sorry, I am not intellectual person. My education backgrownd is little and my English is poor too.