The Year of the Fourth-Quarter Collapse

One of the most incongruous characteristics of Philippine society is the popularity of basketball among a people not noted for their height. The greater interest is in the professional game which is played in quarters rather than according to the amateur rule of dividing the game into two halves. To the Filipino fan, nothing evokes a greater thrill than the fourth-quarter rally, a situation where nothing that the favoured team does can go wrong and allows it to catch up with and surpass the score of the opposing team in the span of the last twelve minutes of the game. Moves are executed perfectly, a very high percentage of the shots go in, loose balls generally end up in or near the hands of their players, and close calls by the referee favour them. In other words, the hard work and skill of the players combined with good luck allow the favoured team to make up for what had generally been bad first three quarters to, as the cliché goes, snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Conversely, the most dismaying development for the fan would be a situation where their favoured team has built a comfortable lead through three very competently played quarters but is suddenly unable to do anything right to protect the hard-earned lead in the last. The fourth-quarter collapse is a syndrome that has affected even the very best teams. Teams with the most disciplined and highly trained and skilled players can find themselves in situations where nothing works in the fourth quarter, and end up handing over to the opposing team what looked in the first part of the game like certain victory.

The analogy of the fourth-quarter collapse is a way of describing the Philippines in 2009. The end of 2008 did not give much room for confidence. There was concern about how the Philippines would cope with the long-term effects of the global financial crisis. There were projections of overseas Filipino workers being laid off and forced to come back to the country. Not only would the volume of remittances upon which the Philippine economy had become so reliant diminish, it would also intensify the expected effects of the financial crisis on the unemployment situation.