Lessons from the UAE debacle

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Last Wednesday Football fans in Malaysia cringed in shame and disbelief when our national team was whitewashed 10-0 by United Arab Emirate (UAE) in a World Cup qualifying match.

That defeat has gone done on record as the biggest defeat suffered by Malaysia in an international match but it is history now and the best we can do is to pick up the pieces and move on.

However, this humiliation is not only about football but a reflection of how our nation is struggling to keep up to the standard and advancement in the globalised world.

There are bright spots over the years as we move forward in development and progress but the trouble is we are just not moving as fast as many other nations in coping with the demands of the modern world.

Countries like Taiwan and South Korea which in the 60s and 70s were at par with us economically have moved past us while we now have for company the likes of Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines which were behind us back then.

To be fair overall Malaysia has not fared as badly as our football in the global arena as our national team has not only failed to maintain its standard but actually slip down the world ranking.

The hankering for the good old days from the 60s to the 80s when our national team was one of the most feared in Asia is not nostalgic murmurings among the older fans.

They have valid reasons to hark back at the golden era of our football and wished those stars of yesteryears are in the national teams now.

A team comprising the likes of Soh Chin An, Santokh Sing, Shukor Salleh , Mokhtar Dahari, James Wong , Hassan Sani, Abdah Ali, Arumugam, Chow Chee Keong and other football heroes of that era would have given our present crop of national players a licking anytime.

In the aftermath of the national team’s meltdown in UAE head coach Dollah Salleh took the honourable step by resigning. But as Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin pointed out his resignation was just a step towards the rehabilitation of the national team as the UAE debacle was symptomatic of the malaise plaguing football in the nation.

What Khairy said about football can also be applied to government linked companies and government subsidiaries which failed miserably but are stuck in the quagmire of their failures because the people helming them refused to resign.

It is not the Malaysian culture for heads of such bodies to take responsibility for their failures.

Dollah Salleh had failed miserably as the national football coach but he can still hold his head up high for taking responsibility for his team’s failures.

In doing so hopefully he has set an example for others in similar situations to follow.