NOT ENOUGH GOOD COACHES

THE GROUND IS LAID, NURTURING IS NEXT

Comment By Tony Mariadass

The restructured National Football Development Programme (NFDP) after Malaysia’s Under-16 team’s failure to qualify for World U-17 tournament last year, is thorough and is perfect on paper.

The million-ringgit question is whether this NFDP set up in 2014 and the brainchild of former Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin, is on the right track and will be implemented and monitored diligently?

Yes, it is as a long term programme, but at the same time there are still many ills that need to be addressed urgently.

On the surface with all the statistics, it looks all honky-dory.

But beneath that, there are still many teething problems ranging from poor quality coaches, not the right coaches appointed, poor monitoring of the programme, wages issues, the best players not in the programme and many others.

Speaking to many coaches involved in the programme, they had many issues and were an unhappy lot. Some who have served well have been unceremoniously left out under the new management after the change of government last year. Cronyism prevails.

There are still grouses on the ground, both from coaches and parents of children and meetings are ongoing to address the issues.

Of course, there has been success stories from the NFDP both locally and international championships.

Among the NFDP’s biggest achievements was emerging as champions of the 2015 Costa del Sol Iber Cup in Portugal and winning the 2016 SuperMokh Cup that was held in Kuala Lumpur.

The Under-14 AMD squad also won the Whitsun tournament in Dortmund, Germany besides winning the Vogido trophy in Enschede, the Netherlands, last June.

The national Under-19 under coach Brad Maloney had called up 12 players from the Academy Mokhtar Dahari (AMD) and Under-17 team under coach Bojan Hodak, had nine players.

Lim Teong Kim who was first appointed as the NFDP technical director in 2013, has now assumed the post of AMD director in 2016 and his contact ends end of this month. All indications are that his contract will not be renewed.

His duties as technical director has been taken over by Frechman Saad Ichalalene after the programme was restructured in December.

The restructuring of the NFDP has seen the major role of steering the programme swift from the Youth and Sports Ministry to the National Sports Council and FA of Malaysia

The sport minister, Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman, heads the NFDP Steering Committee, with Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) president, Datuk Hamidin Mohd Amin as his deputy. Datuk Ahmad Shapawi Ismail (Director-general of National Sports Council - NSC) is secretary and Stuart Ramalingam (FAM secretary general) as assistant secretary of this committee.

Other representation in this committee are from the Ministry of Sports, Ministry of Education, NSC, National Sports Institute – (ISN) and FAM.

Then, there is another working committee headed by Ahmad Shapawi, then a Technical Committee headed by Datuk Sri Subahan Kamal, the FAM deputy president.

The NFDP state programme is headed by another technical committee spearheaded by Saad Ichalalene, who hails from youth academy of Paris Saint German with Peter Roo, the FAM technical director, who is the advisor to this committee.

The roles of the various committees and agencies involved have been clearly defined and hope each execute their roles effectively.

But how well the decisions, the vision and mission, are implemented on the ground is left to be seen. The programme is so huge and whether it has the manpower to monitor, is a big question mark.

The powers in charge will claim that they have everything in place, but therein lies the problem because at the grassroots the implementation and monitoring is left much to be desired.

For the record, the NFDP training centres comes in layers throughout the country from the district to national level – starting with the Academy Tunas (46 centres), District Training Centre (62 centres), Schools Sports Schools (14 schools) and the AMD, for a total of 123 centres.

Coaches in all these centres total up to 702 and a total of 14,728 are participants!

Indeed, impressive numbers. But is numbers and quantity we are looking at, or quality and effectiveness.

Other areas of NFDP include their coach educators, talent scouting, strength and conditioning and goalkeeper educator. Do they have enough personnel in these areas to address, monitor and divulge the knowledge effectively?

Is conducting courses once a year sufficient?

Competition is also in place with Ministry of Education league for Under-14 and Under-17 under Super and Premier league, district, state and national level tournaments.

Then we have Super League teams in the MFL, required to have a development programme and have youth teams. Some States and clubs like Johor DT, Selangor, PKNS, PJ City FC to name a few have structured programmes and youth teams and invest in it. But others choose the easy way out to adopt a school as their programme.

JDT spend RM2.2million for their youth development programs. They started four years ago and in the last two years we have won seven youth titles.

Let’s not forget, that there are private academies all over the country which are not registered with the FA of Malaysia, where thousands of children attend.

FAM should immediately ask all these academies to register with them so that they can be monitored and also ensure qualified coaches are involved, proper facilities are in place and have a programme which will bear fruit.

The huge interest in development augurs well for the future of Malaysian football, but it has to be implemented, monitored and have quality for the end quality to polished and shining.

With the 2020 budget announcing that the NFDP will be allocated RM45 million for next year – an increase of 30 million (they started with RM3.5 million before being raised to RM30 million), it is hoped that the money is channelled to the proper areas and used wisely for the development of the programme and game.