Bidding for the BIDC Cup

The Cambodian U23 team who'll compete for the BIDC Cup

News is filtering through of the 4-team football competition that will take place at the Olympic Stadium from 8-14 November and will provide the Cambodian Under-23 squad with invaluable match practice in their run up to the SEA Games that get underway in early December. The sponsors are offering a $20k prize for the winners and half that for the runners-up. The BIDC Cup will be sponsored by The Bank for Investment and Development of Cambodia PLC, a Vietnamese Bank. The 4 teams will be the Cambodian and Laos Under-23 teams, as well as two club sides from the Vietnam League, Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) from Pleiku who finished 6th in the V-League this term, and Vissai Ninh Binh, who won the equivalent of the First Division to get promotion to the V-league in the season just ended. HAGL are one of the stalwarts of the V-League, having won league and cup double in 2003 and 2004 and finished 3rd a couple of seasons ago. They also act as a nursery club for Arsenal. The bank which is sponsoring the round-robin tournament was previously known as Prosperity Investment Bank and was bought up a couple of months ago by the Vietnamese sister bank BIDV and renamed. The tournament will also co-incide with Cambodia's 56th anniversary of independence. Meanwhile, the forthcoming SEA Games are keeping everyone busy with a pre-SEA tournament being held in Laos this week involving teams from Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.