Greg Slaughter feels like teams will play as tough as they can against the Philippines, especially now that the country is known for the wrong reasons, no thanks to the brawl with Australia last July.
The 7-foot slotman said as much after Gilas Pilipinas’ tune-up against the visiting Jordanian national team, Wednesday evening at the Meralco Gym in Pasig City. The match ended abruptly after emotions started running high.
Gilas head coach Yeng Guiao and Jordanian counterpart Joseph Stiebing got into verbal altercations twice in the game, as they both aimed to protect their players. The second spat resulted in the match being called off.
It wasn’t just like any other tune-up, as physicality was everywhere. Christian Standhardinger received a hard foul from Yousef Abuzawaneh, while someone threw a ball at Scottie Thompson.
Slaughter opined that the other squads might think that Gilas will no longer stand up for themselves after the incident between the Philippines and Australia last July. For anyone thinking that, he declared they are dead wrong.
“Well you know a lot of teams are gonna come and play physical,” said Slaughter after their default 82-73 win.
“I don’t know whether the teams think we might back down because of the incident we had versus Australia.”
Frustration apparently got the best of the Jordanians in the match. They once held a 19-point lead in the second frame, only for Gilas to come back in the third with a rousing 31-4 blitz en route to a 69-59 lead late in the period.
Still, Slaughter made it known that the Filipino dribblers won’t back down from any challenge in their way.
“We’re not gonna back down from any team. We’re just gonna play our game,” said Slaughter, himself one of the pioneers of the Gilas program.
“And if they want a physical game, we’ll be ready to play a physical game.”
