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 Dahair, 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 withourt 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 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.
