The same facilities used when the Philippine Basketball Association held the 2020 Philippine Cup under a bubble will be retained when the country hosts the third and last window of the FIBA Asia Cup qualifiers in February next year.
Samahang Basketball ng Pilipinas executive director Sonny Barrios said this following talks with FIBA officials on how they will go about this when the games of Group A are held in Angeles City, Pampanga two months from now.
“FIBA asked us if we can host the games under the PBA bubble. They were looking for this arrangement under a FIBA bubble,” said Barrios in a Zoom huddle with officials of the Bases Conversion Development Authority and the SBP.
Barrios talked about the facilities to be used in the presence of SBP president Aldredo Panlilio and BCDA president and CEO Vince Dizon.
Because of this, the scheduled matches of the qualifiers will be done in the same gymnasium used in the Philippine Cup, which is the Angeles University Foundation.
The equipment used will be the same, except for the electronic scoreboard.
“The understanding is that we will host it under a PBA bubble, and there will be no equipment that will be supplied by FIBA except for the electronic scoreboard,” said Barrios.
Clark will host eight national teams from Group A which include the Gilas Pilipinas Men, along with teams from South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand.
Games in Group C will also be held, and will include teams from New Zealand, Australia, Guam, and Hong Kong.
Tighter measures are expected in Clark now that it has been chosen to host another major sports event.
Samahang Basketball ng Pilipinas president Alfredo Panlilio said that FIBA will set its own guidelines for the qualifiers and will be closely linked with the existing protocols of the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID).
“FIBA and IATF guidelines will be married here. This will make it a safe event,” said Panlilio. Peter Atencio
Dizon explained that some of the strict protocols implemented during the PBA bubble will be improved for the FIBA qualifiers.
These include regular testing of the players and other members of the delegation upon entering the bubble and during the games, and the mandatory isolation while waiting for negative RT-PCR test results.
