Club Brugge defender Dion Cools has turned down the chance to represent Malaysia in the 2017 SEA Games, Malaysia U-22 team head coach Frank Bernhardt confirmed.<\/p>\n
The 20-year-old footballer was born in Malaysia to a Malaysian father and a Belgian mother. He has played for the Belgium U-19 and U-22, but as long as he has not played for any country at a senior level, he still can choose between Belgium and Malaysia.<\/p>\n
However, coach Bernhardt confirmed that the half-Malaysian defender won’t be playing in the 2017 SEA Games, which will be held in Malaysia in August.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were told about a player in Belgium. I tried to contact him but it’s hard to get the player to play for the U-23 and U-22 teams because he\u2019s only thinking about the national team,\u201d Bernhardt told reporters.<\/p>\n
Cools joined Club Brugge in 2015 and has made 15 league appearances for the club.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Club Brugge defender Dion Cools has turned down the chance to represent Malaysia in the 2017 SEA Games, Malaysia U-22 team head coach Frank Bernhardt confirmed. The 20-year-old footballer was born in Malaysia to a Malaysian father and a Belgian mother. He has played for the Belgium U-19 and U-22, but as long as he has not played for any country at a senior level, he still can choose between Belgium and Malaysia. However, coach Bernhardt confirmed that the half-Malaysian defender won’t be playing in the 2017 SEA Games, which will be held in Malaysia in August. \u201cWe were told about a player in Belgium. I tried to contact him … Continue reading “Belgium-based Dion Cools turned down chance to play in 2017 SEA Games”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":1698,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[64,69],"class_list":["post-1697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-southeast-asia","tag-malaysia","tag-sea-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/football-tribe.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}