Failure, if not addressed immediately, can be habit forming. It leads us
to more failure and, ultimately, total ruin. Malaysian football is in that
parlous state.
We had it all and we have it all, but riches which are
not utilised properly still render us paupers in world football. Today, we are
obsessed with all the wrong things.
Sports is all about fairness,
honesty, pride and passion. Fifty years after independence we are deluding
ourselevs into giving excuses for failure.
All the rhetoric and promises
cannot hide the fact that, after 50 years of nationhood, we are still grappling
to deal with certain realities. Nothing puts it in better focus than the game
which was the very soul of the nation until its decline 20 years ago.
Today, we pay scant attention the Malaysia Cup and other local competitions. We
have all been converted to the English Premier League, ardent devotees of a
football religion practised thousands of miles away.
The fault is in our
changing perpectives and values and misguided social dogmas which have strayed
drastically off the straight and narrow of tolerance and acceptance which once
made Malaysian football great. There is no need for insightful
soul-searching or recriminations. The problem, if we only choose to see it with
2020 vision, is in our changing attitudes.
The cloud over the game is
that of bigotry and hypocrsiy, the refusal to accept the reality of the
situation. There can be no quotas in sports. Only the best will do and most
nations recognise this immutable fact.
Malaysian soccer lost its lustre
two decades ago and we are still trying to fool ourselves that we can polish
dull granite into diamonds. Just look around you. We no longer have teams
worthy of total support like Man United, Liverpool or Arsenal. We no longer
have star players who appeal to youngsters. We no longer have a national team
of substance.
If we are brutally honest we would recognise that our
professional league are nothing more than a social outing - a kickabout with
players of scant talent.
There is no urgency, no driv, no zest, no
belief. Most damning of all, there is no passion.
The game is in a state
of chaos governed by an association leading by disassociation. The inertia is
suffocating. The states are doing their own thing, which ususally is nothing.
The clubs are doing their own thing, which usually is nothing. And the schools
are doing their own thing, which is, again,, nothing. All that nothing is
telling on the game.
The only way to remedy the situation is by
admitting our faults. That football has been victim to human vulnerability.
That we have lost sight of the game and its needs in pursuing personal
objectives driven by nationalistic and political motives.
That the game
is no longer the glue that binds the nation. That there is no production line
of talent simply because kids in the neighbourhood no longer kick the ball
around together with common intent and a sense of camaraderie.
That the
mould that produced the likes of Mokhtar Dahari, Soh Chin Aun and M. Chandran is
well and truely broken. The sense of loss is acute.
While Thailand,
Singapore and Indonesia are talking positively of qualfying for the World Cup,
we are still sifting through the ashes of past glories.
Our recent
showings are typical of the least productive sequence of results for a quarter
of a century. We are routinely losing to nations without any soccer capital,
like the Maldives and Sri Lanka and offering the same pathetic excuses for
those humiliations.
Unfortunately, the statistics don't lie. They
expose the barren landscape of Malaysian football more than the sun bleached
skulls of the Pol Pot's killing fields.
It is a depressing scenario.
yet, besides the usual diatribe, there is no firm policy or philosopy on hand
to rescue the game from the dire straits it has been steered into by careless
and incompetent stewardship.
The FA of Malaysia's incompetence and
disconcerting indifference are central to the game's decline. They have
compromsed on quality and talent creation to appease the treacherous demands of
racial mores.
We had, as nation, a head start on most Western countries
where it came to learning about racial tolerance and living together in
harmony. In fact, we had a good 800 or more years to learn and we did but we
have thrown it all away,.
So now we watch and marvel at how whites and
blacks embrace each other without inhibition or pretence on the football
field. We hardly see such open integration and brotherhood on our soccer
pitches anymore.
Nine of the starting 11 in the French national team are
black. Most of the other European teams also have coloured players in their
national teams, even Germany. Our teams propagate disintegration even as the
government encourages integration.
It is the power of performance which
instils confidence and thereby drives results. That is unlikely to happen until
we once again have the best players, irregardleess of ethnicity, playing for the
country.
The truth is we have regressed. Without equality, without
integration, without tearing down the walls of distrust we have built between
the races, we have no hope of rejuvenating our national game.
Football
is all about disregarding colour and creed. That is why it is called the
beautiful game. That game has grown ugly in Malaysia because we have brought
racial divides into the sport. Just ask the former greats who they will tell
you why we were once great.
There really can be no solution to this
malaise until we accept and understand our faults. We can no longer afford to
gloss over our deficiencies.
There is a need to correct the weaknesses
which have been allowed to become a prolonged and debilitating malaise. The
cycle of failure, once embarked upon, is not easily counteracted and, in
consequence, success is made so much harder to revive. It becomes a habit.
There is an urgent need for a different perspective. We need to create
excitement in the game again. We need all the races to start playing the game
again. We players who want to pursue their ambitions beyond the local leagues.
We need ambition, but above all we need that spirit of brotherhood and
patriotism over-riding all other inane dogmas.
We need a reality check -
a brutally honest one. Unless something is done to jolt the powers that be out
of their stupor and come to grips with of the realities, we will continue to
live in the past.
Otherwise, 50 plus years into nationhood we will be living
a lie which will destroy whatever semblance of the game we have left.
Malaysian football has become the worst thing a sport can become - something to
be endured rather than enjoyed. It has run out of credit and into serious
overdraft. It has lost all its credibity and become something to be
vilified.
It is time for us to say enough to all the platitudes and
evasions if the game is to have any hope. Enough of the ridiculous slogans and
empty rhetoric - just get honest and get on with it.
Let the revolution
begin.
