WILL
there be a fresh breath of air in the 2015 M-League season? I
personally doubt it. I do not want to sound pessimistic, especially with
the FA of Malaysia trying to make the league exciting and one of the
best in the region, but it has been cosmetic changes all this while.
And continuous tweaking of the format since 1989 –
when football in the country went semi-pro — the composition of teams
and the direction adopted have not helped one bit.
Now
M-League intends to go private in 2015. All I can say is good luck
because I do not see much changing when the same coaches and players,
especially, are expected to be involved.
Let us just look ahead to the 2014 season. Do we
expect to see fresh faces, a new breed of coaches and established
foreign players who can lift the profile of the league? Probably not on
all three counts.
For starters, the same players will be making their
rounds, either following their previous coach to a new team or marketing
themselves to new teams as a package of players or individuals.
The fact that most teams and players have signed one-year contracts will see the players move to new teams.
While
professional football is all about the movement of players, when it is
about the same players year in and year out, things become stale and
predictable.
And the fact that the local coaches are the same
faces – some of them have been around for as long as 30 years – is
certainly not going to light up the league.
The
last time we saw new coaches in the M-League was 10 years ago when the
likes of Zainal Abidin Hassan, Dollah Salleh, Mat Zan Mat Aris, K.
Devan, E. Elavarasan and Azuan Zain, to name but a few, surfaced. Among
the older coaches still on the scene are Abdul Rahman Ibrahim, Wan Jamak
Wan Hassan and Irfan Bakti.
And with Malaysia virtually out of the Asian Cup in
Australia in 2016 after Tuesday’s solitary goal loss to Qatar, fans are
calling for the resignation of national coach Datuk K. Rajagobal and FA
of Malaysia’s officials.
Is that going to change anything?
The
root of the problem is the quality of the national players we have and
the strength of the national team is always reflected by the strength of
the national league – the M-League.
In all fairness to the current national team, they
did well based on their current strength. To have lost to Middle Eastern
countries like Qatar and Bahrain narrowly only underlines the fact that
the national team’s overall standard has improved because we used to
get whipped by these teams not too long ago.
But to expect the national team to become world beaters overnight and on their current strength is beyond the wildest dreams.
The
national team’s major let-down was its strike force. The M-League’s top
scorers in the last two seasons have been foreigners – Jean-Emmauel
Effa Owona (15 goals in 2012) and Marlon Alex James and Matias Conti (16
goals each this season).
Top scoring national players this season are Amri Yahya (8) and Norshahrul Idlan Tahala (7).
And
we still want to increase the quota for foreign players! How on earth
are we going to develop local strikers if we continue to rely on foreign
players?
And development is the last thing on the minds of
most teams with the President's Cup (for junior players) getting low
priority and running for only a few months.
Can we expect the MLeague, whether or not it is privatised, to suddenly come to life and improve the game in the country?
It is indeed wishful thinking, but the majority
still believe it is the only way to go and then scream blue murder when
the national team fails to do well. We celebrate, go overboard and give
holidays for regional level and mediocre success and fail to get a
reality check. Only when the truth hits the face when up against
international opponents do we realise that we have been living on false
hopes. Too late, isn’t it?
The only way for Malaysian football
to go forward is to have a long-term plan and start with the young.
Nothing is going to happen overnight.
The M-League needs more new faces and a younger composition to make it tick.
If we try to teach ‘old dogs new tricks’, we are
going to continue to face disappointments. We cannot make race horses
out of circus horses and the sooner we realise it the better.
The National Football Development Programme with a five-year vision
is a good move, provided that it is not sabotaged or not given enough
support by the stakeholders of the game.
Let us start building our football home from the foundations and stop trying to fix it from the roof!
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