World Cup - Makan Bola, Menang Bola

You could have forgiven coach Norizan Bakar for feeling a little pissed. It wasn’t the disappointment of missing out on last night’s episode of CSI, or the pungent smell of balut in the nearby Filipino coffee shop. Rather, his Malaysian football team had come up empty when the moment for redemption was the greatest.

The mission was clear—beat Vietnam in the semi-finals of the 23rd SEA Games in the Philippines, and the finals beckoned. Yet, in an all-too familiar scenario, Malaysia lost 2-1 to the team that kicked their noble behinds at the previous SEA Games. Norizan was understandably miffed, even choosing to skip the mandatory post-match press conference. Who gives a hoot when your team played about as cohesively as a Nick Lachey-Jessica Simpson marriage?

Malaysia: a country of 25 million people living in affluence, with eight percent living below the poverty line. And only a bronze medal in a sub-par regional soccer tournament to show for it.

That was 2nd December, 2005. And as he sat in the team bus, staring out the window, Norizan’s mind could have wandered to a country a thousand miles away…

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You could have forgiven Stephen Okechukwu Keshi for feeling a little euphoric. The news had barely registered—Togo’s national football coach had been shortlisted for the African Coach of the Year. Around one-and-a-half years ago, the former captain of Nigeria had accepted an offer to train a squad of footballers mostly plying their trade in lower French divisions. “Do your best,” he was told. “We don’t expect much.”

Two years later, Togo had qualified for the grandest kahuna of them all: the World Cup.

“We have come to the World Cup to learn,” Keshi said later, still dazed at the prospect of rubbing shoulders with Sven Goran Erikkson and Guus Hiddink.

Togo: a country of six million people ravaged by AIDS and political unrest, with 32 percent of the population living below the poverty line. Now guaranteed a berth on the grandest stage of them all, with another possible selection for Keshi as the continent’s most glowing coach.

That was 2nd December, 2005. And while Keshi smiled for the cameras, few would have noticed a tiny footnote in his expanding football CV—a team he used to play for eight years ago. A team by the name of Perlis. A team that was coached two years ago by none other than Norizan Bakar.

Irony can be a bitch.

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Bemoaning Malaysia’s lack of success on a football field is turning into an annual ritual. And admittedly, it’s getting rather stale, with no end in sight to our team’s sorry state. Just recently, the Under-20 national team competed against a hastily assembled group of amateur footballers labelled ‘MyTeam’—comprising of trainees who were selected from a reality television show—and narrowly won 2-1. It wasn’t exactly a performance that inspired confidence; in a stadium full of 50,000 ardent football fans, the national team was booed. By its own Malaysian supporters, no less.

Maybe those fans were just PMS-ing because it’s that time of the decade—when biological clocks are readjusted, beer consumption goes up and electricity bills skyrocket. The 18th World Cup has arrived from Germany in all its mega-hyped, media-fuelled glory, drawing the battle lines between the favourites and the underdogs, the flamboyant and the staid, Nike and Adidas.

Among the first-timers include Angola, a country so devastated by a 27-year civil war that land mines dot the city streets; Ukraine, who at 15-years-old, is one of the world’s youngest nations; Trinidad & Tobago, a nation with barely over one million citizens residing in their two main islands; and Togo, who have since sacked Keshi, proving that football is indeed a cruel game. All teams hailing from nations with probably less cash and infrastructure than an acre of Putrajaya.

Yet 76 years in, and still no red, blue and yellow flag flying its mast at the world’s biggest sporting event.

It’s about time we pull up our socks, put away the mee goreng and crack our heads over something useful. Forget those sorry excuses, nonchalant shrugs and same ol’, same ol’ solutions. What we need is to get radical; out-of-our-minds, high-on-crack, Tom Cruise-jumping-on-the-couch radical. It was the similarly eccentric Lewis Carroll who said that at times, he believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. And even the mastermind of Alice in Wonderland would admit that seeing Malaysia at football’s Big Enchilada would be as far-fetched as a girl falling down a rabbit hole into another universe.

But for our nation to get anywhere near global prominence, and to stand a fighting chance of making it to World Cup 2648 in the North Pole, there are only three paths it can take. Each on the surface is unthinkable, but at the root, is absolutely required:

1. HOST IT
It doesn’t take a 16 A1 SPM scorer to figure out that Malaysian athletes seemingly perform better when they have the convenience of a nearby kopitiam or mamak for their nutritional supplements. We won the Thomas Cup on our home soil in 1992, snared our largest gold medal tally at the 1998 Kuala Lumpur Commonwealth Games, and routinely pummel opposition when we host the SEA Games. Deplored by many as the ‘Jaguh Kampung’ syndrome, it’s the only way to explain why our sportsmen and women can be world-beaters on our shores, and get creamed into bubur cha-cha overseas.

So, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Let’s embrace the village hero label and take the most automatic, masturbatory way to the World Cup: host it. Want venues? Every state already has a football stadium, and a few million ringgit here and there would easily spruce them up to international standards. How about experience? We’ve hosted the SEA Games five times, and can draw from huge events such as the Commonwealth Games, Formula One, the Asian X-Games, the equestrian World Cup Jumping Finals and the Asian Canoe Championships. Gosh, we even have our own national car and airline to ferry VIPs and delegates to and from destinations.

And most importantly, it will do wonders for the growth of football here. The host nation has won the World Cup six times, and look what it did for South Korea. The Asian team hadn’t won a game in five previous trips to the event, yet as co-hosts in 2002, they suddenly beat traditional powers Italy and Spain all the way to the semi-finals. The soccer-numb Americans hosted the World Cup in 1994, made the second round and used it to kickstart their own soccer league. Even South Africa, who will be welcoming the world to its doorstep come World Cup 2010, estimates that the event will pump RM11.5 billion into its economy. With that kind of money, we might never have to pay toll again.

Yes, it will cost trillions of ringgit, and it might mean we will temporarily have to pay a bomb for petrol. But where would you prefer your money to go to: in the pockets of policemen, city council members and wasted building projects, or into bringing the world’s greatest event to football pitches nationwide? Or to put it more succinctly, Disneyland or World Cup?

2. LEARN IT
If hosting the World Cup seems like the easy way out, then it’s time to learn from Mum. When she taught us the importance of eating our vegetables, she did it by adopting two principles: start young, and don’t take no for an answer. It’s the same bedrock that underlines the drastic measure suggested here: make football a compulsory school subject.

Just imagine: a four-year-old enters kindergarten, and along with Science and English, he or she learns how to dribble a football. Then, the youngster enters primary school, and spends one hour every afternoon taking free kicks with fellow classmates. By the time this kid graduates from Form Five, the teen would have mastered almost every necessary facet of the game: shooting, tackling, faking injury, arguing with the referee. Now, multiply that by the number of students around our country, and pretty soon, we could field two teams at the World Cup, with budding Ronaldos and Ronaldinettes.

Critics will point out that not every child is football-inclined. But not every child is mathematically-inclined either. If you make it an obligatory part of the educational curriculum, kids are not going to gather in the hundreds and walk the streets of KL in protest. Much like how our parents forced us to play the piano at an early age, kids may initially grumble, but then get on with it and thank us later. Too many subjects already? Throw some out; who needs Geography or Moral Studies when you can bend it like Beckham? Football would benefit kids a whole lot more than sitting at home fiddling with Playstation 2 joysticks or surfing the Internet for Jenna Jameson’s newest picture. Obesity will become a thing of the past. And best of all, students will never cut their football classes for some crummy cybercafé.

3. BREED IT
On the evening of 12 September 1980, a baby entered the world crying and kicking. The toddler’s proud mother and father were both retired basketball players—and at 1.88m and 2.08m respectively, were freaking tall. Carefully brought together by the Shanghai Sports Commission, they had given birth to an enormous baby; one who would later grow up to be 7 feet 6 inches, and lead his country in a basketball revolution while becoming a global brand. That boy’s name, if you haven’t already guessed, is Yao Ming.

Among the many things we could learn from China’s basketball production line (which has now yielded a 7-foot-9 player) is that, as crude as it sounds, maybe the best way we’ll see our very own Wayne Rooney is to intentionally grow him. Make the Youth and Sports Ministry an undercover matchmaking agency; pair a talented, physically imposing, intelligent football player with a more-than-adequately skilled girl, and watch the results. We might not just get one Thierry Henry; we might have a dozen running around, wrecking havoc on inter-school leagues. Nurture them in an army-style barrack, feed them on a diet of Milo and protein shakes, and when they’re ready, launch them into an unsuspecting world. Sure, they might have the personality of wallpaper; but heck, they’ll be prototypical football superstars, a model for aspiring children everywhere.

But, some argue, it’s not like we have a humongous football gene pool to choose from here. In that case, let’s cast our net over a larger sea, and lure the big fishes to stay here, with incentives. Give Ronaldinho a mansion in Langkawi, his own helicopter to escape traffic jams, and a Maya Karin-lookalike for companionship. Not only would it be fun to imagine their offspring as a male model with buck teeth, but the little ‘un would terrorise defences for years to come. And Malaysian football can finally harbour hopes of moving on, and aiming high.

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Of course, the chances of any of these happening are about as likely as snow in Kuala Lumpur. The three golden ‘M’s—money, manpower and MPs—will not allow it. But desperate times do call for desperate steps. If this period isn’t the lowest of the low for our Malaysian football scene, then we might have to wait until our national team loses to East Timor before authorities wake up. And by that time, it will take a mammoth effort to resuscitate a hibernating public who, frankly dear, won’t give a damn.