Refleksi Minda

It’s that time again. The once in every 4 years football extravaganza, a celebration of a sport enjoyed by most of the world’s population. It garners more interest than the Olympics, it gets more viewers then any other television spectacles ever conceived by men. It can unite and divide, it flares passions, it elicits emotions. It’s the World Cup.

And at its most basic, it’s just watching 22 men chasing after a single ball.

Of course, no objective football fan will be able to say with a straight face that the tournament hosts the best teams in the world. The fact that qualification to the World Cup is organised by regions mean that the will certainly be teams that are not the best 32 of the world. If this is the case, most of the countries participating in the tournament would hail from Europe; such is the quality of football in the continent. But this is a tournament of the world and therefore what is presented is the best teams from each of the regions; Europe’s UEFA, Asia’s AFC, North and Central America’s CONCACAF, South America’s CONMEBOL, Oceania’s OCEANIA and Africa’s CAF.

There have been suprising ommissions from this year’s tournament. African powerhouses Nigeria and Cameroon are nowhere to be seen, along with last time’s darlings Senegal (perhaps because most of their star players went to Liverpool after the tournament?). 2002’s semi-finalists Turkey also did not qualify, as well as regular qualifiers Denmark (maybe because Gravesen moved to Real Madrid from Everton?). Of course, the usual suspects like Brazil, Argentina, Italy, England, Spain and Asia’s champions Japan have qualified, along with newcomers Australia, Ivory Coast, Angola and Togo.

As usual, everytime the World Cup comes along, Malaysians everywhere will wonder what it would be like if the country had qualified. In the absence of our nation, Malaysians looks elsewhere for teams to support; Brazil, Argentina, Italy and England becoming the team of choice for mosts. A lot has been said about our country’s lack of football prowess; not only are we nothing in terms of world rankings, we are a non-factor in Asian football and even considered minnows in the South East Asian region. A sad fact that raises a lot of questions, a lot of theories, a lot of finger pointings but never a viable solution.

We have our reasons to be asking. Togo has a population of 6 million people. Trinidad and Tobago has a population of 1.3 million people. Yet these countries have qualified for the Cup, whereas our 25 million could not produce 22 players that are able to compete with the region. Lack of resources? Our GDP, according to the World Bank, is $260 billion, whilst Costa Rica’s is $40 billion. Yet, which of these countries are playing in Germany?

The government has invested vast amounts of funds to develop the quality of our football. And yet, so far, our contry’s ranking is stuck in the region of 127th, far lower than the likes of Congo, Rwanda, Kenya, Guatemala and even Singapore (it’s definitely not the water our players drink then). And we can’t say that the country has not got the interest; football is easily the most played sport in Malaysia. The sport transcends races and religion, age and even sometimes sex (Gol and Gincu anyone?).

Lack of motivation? Meddlings from royalty? Incompetent administration? Corruption? The FAM General Secretary has said in an interview that his dream is to put Malaysia into the World Cup, yet so far I cannot see any improvements from the last few years. The MyTeam programme, for all its hints of political power plays was a step in the right direction; although its commercialism looks to be its undoing. Indeed, it would be hard to see where the where the MyTeam players are headed after this; their defeat to what is essentially the ‘B’ national team may very well signal the end of that experiment.

I personally am not in a position to pinpoint where it all went wrong. Nor am I able to provide a solution. But what I do know that our country deserve a football team that we can be proud of.

Until that time, I would continue to enjoy the football offered by the rest of the world. For now, I adopt England as the team that I support, while my Asian pride look to Japan, South Korea, Iran and Saudi Arabia for a cause of celebration (although right now, Japan and Iran seem destined not to qualify for the next round). Deep in my heart however, and I’m sure deep in most Malaysian’s heart, we wait for a reason to rush to the shops to purchase an original royal yellow jersey with our flag emblazoned on it.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 9:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.