http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/sports/merah-putih-faces-another-four-year-wait-after-falling-in-turkmenistan/428016
Merah Putih Face Another Four-Year Wait After Falling in Turkmenistan March 10, 2011 The defeat of the national Under-23 team by Turkmenistan in the first round of the 2012 Olympic qualifying competition on Wednesday means Indonesia will have gone 56 years without sending a team to the Games. The 1-0 loss in the second leg of the first-round match means that it will be 2016 at the earliest before the Merah Putih qualifies. Indonesia last fielded a team in the Olympics at the 1956 Melbourne Games. Turkmenistan advanced to the second round with an impressive 4-1 aggregate victory after it won the first leg 3-1 in Palembang last month. Ruslan Mingazov's 25th-minute goal at the Olympic Stadium in Ashgabat, the Turkmen capital, sent the 28,000 fans home happy. The second round draw will take place in Kuala Lumpur on March 30, with the matches scheduled to be played on June 19 and 23. The defeat means coach Alfred Riedl must decide whether to stay faithful to his current lineup or revamp his squad by calling up several new players for the next big challenge - winning the 2011 Southeast Asian Games. Previously, the Austrian coach had said he would most likely keep the majority of the Olympic team players for the SEA Games, however, disappointing performances in the two Olympic qualifying matches may cause him to reconsider. Indonesia has not won the SEA Games since 1991, but much is expected this time because it will play host in the November event. Meanwhile, Palestine celebrated its first official match on home soil on Wednesday on a bittersweet evening in which its under-21 side lost to Thailand 6-5 on penalties. Palestine won Wednesday's match 1-0 to force the game into extra time because the first leg in Bangkok on Feb 23 had also finished 1-0. Abdulhamid Abuhabib scored the only goal of the game with a powerful volley into the corner of the net in the 43rd minute, but the host team lost out in the penalty shootout in front of over 16,000 home supporters. For the Palestinians, the game was another symbolic step toward confirming their credentials for the state they intend to establish in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. "This is another occasion on which we can show we are a state. Every time I come here it makes me proud," Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told Reuters at the Faisal Husseini Stadium. Until October 2008, when it hosted Jordan in a friendly international at Al-Ram, Palestine played all its matches abroad because football's world governing body, FIFA, deemed the Palestinian territories unsafe to host visiting teams. Still in the region, it was announced on Thursday that Singapore's twice-delayed Olympic qualifier against Yemen would now be played in the United Arab Emirates. FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation chose Al Ain in the Abu Dhabi emirate as a neutral venue after deciding the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, was unsafe due to the ongoing political protests against President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The AFC says the two-leg tie will be played as a doubleheader on March 19 and 21. JG, Reuters, A [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
