Malaysia, a broken sporting nation

 

Malaysia’s favourite sports this year had all the awkwardness of a reversing dump truck without any tyres on.

Football tumbled, badminton wobbled, hockey stumbled and athletics toppled. It was spirit-crushing.

Predictably, there was predictable fury from predictable quarters over the athletes’ lack of desire to challenge, with some suggesting a rethink of government funding for poorly-performing sports.

The pride of pulling on a Malaysian shirt and pulling off a moment that will live with people forever has vanished.

Malaysia’s sports personality of the year award might as well be given to Penang-born Singaporean Loh Kean Yew, the new badminton world champion.

In the past, sport had been about how the world saw Malaysia and how Malaysians saw themselves.

They symbolised racial harmony, youth, innovation and skill – a microcosm of the country itself.

Now, they do not bring joy and hope, only humiliation, heartbreak and frustration.

On Sunday, the national football team deepened the despair when they were battered 4-1 by Indonesia in the AFF Cup, failing to get past the first round. They were earlier hammered 3-0 by Vietnam after posting wins over Cambodia and Laos.

Fans picked the bones over Harimau Malaya’s twitching corpse, accusing them of being in an acute creative recession and calling for the axe on FA of Malaysia (FAM) leadership.

Award-winning sportswriter Haresh Deol said it was strange that football, which has been stuck in the Southeast region for decades, remains the number one sport in Malaysia.

He said football received millions of ringgit from the federal and state governments annually, but the returns on investment had been poor.

“What if Malaysian football is labelled as entertainment”? he asked. “Perhaps, this is required to see the game progress as administrators would be forced to source for their own funds, and prove, just like other sports, that they can deliver on the international stage.”

The “Speedy Tigers” learnt a lesson at the recent Junior Hockey World Cup in India: Losers do not learn much from a mismatch especially if it is a turkey shoot.

Malaysia scored 11 goals and conceded 22 in their six matches, letting in 17 goals in the last three encounters to finish eighth of the 16 teams.

It did not feel like hockey and it certainly was not the international hockey that we cherish.

It did not help that certain quarters endorsed mediocrity, with one senior Malaysian Hockey Confederation official referring to the team as having brought “a lot of light, hope and inspiration for the next generation of national hockey players”.

Any more results like this and they will have to stop calling themselves Harimau Malaya and Speedy Tigers under the Trades’ Description Act.

In badminton, we are still chasing world champion glory and Singapore’s success in the men’s singles at the recent world championships, as Badminton Association of Malaysia president Norza Zakaria says, is a wake-up call.

While the players are all work in progress, the over-reliance on a few players could negate the sighting of dawn. A more robust approach to produce more topflight shuttlers is missing.

To save the face of athletics, we must all cover our faces. The fastest a Malaysian sprinter could do in the 100m was a disheartening 10.52 seconds at the national athletics championships over the weekend.

One wonders how the higher education ministry will realise its ambitious project of producing sub-10 second 100m sprinters when national runners have over the years found it hard to dip below 10.5 seconds.

The performances in every track and field event were equally sub-standard, raising the question: Is athletics stuck with an intractable and insoluble problem that could develop in many worrying ways?

While Covid-19 had a significant impact on global sport, especially at the elite level, where it disrupted training and upended the sporting calendar, we were not sufficiently prepared for international competitions.

During a continuing pandemic, which could at any time rekindle, or reappear with a fresh and more worrying variant, everyone must prepare as well as they can.

We have now reached that stage with sports that demands the announcement, “Stop the rot, it’s getting silly.”

However, efforts to contain the reputational damage look frighteningly naïve and both the custodians of sports and the government must rethink their attitude to sport.

The scrapping of the government’s six-year-old podium programme due to lack of funding has denied athletes the best support to achieve consistent success at the highest level.

Worryingly, the number of athletes in the full-time programmes of the national sports council has been reduced from 432 to 288 from next year, again due to drastic spending cuts.

With no further investments in sports, the chances of athletes improving in their disciplines are slim. As it stands, the fate of many of them remains unknown.

National sports associations must be made to run their sports but they just cannot because they have long been financially pampered by the government to the extent that they cannot stand straight.

With sports stuck in reverse, recovery hinges on a major overhaul of the wobbling ecosystem, a change of mindset, firm leadership and fresh ideas.

The present state of affairs might just be the opportunity to ask if we truly have the hunger to change the face and fate of Malaysian sports. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.