MikeDotOrg - Where Boring Is Not Never Interesting...

Tuesday, January 23, 2007 : Malaysia Just Did It

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike says:
... and suddenly the assignments start pouring in. Sorry for the lack of updates, but it's hard to ignore college =(

Anyway, on to another subject. I'm damn jealous lah!
Izzie is now a columnist at a Brunei Newspaper, Skyler got freebies from Star World some time back and my college mate is taking a certain famous blogger up a tall mountain. Damn jealous!
How come my blog doesn't get me anything?? Oh yeah, because I'm not controversial enough. XD
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Whenever the headlines on the back of the local newspapers boom the words Malaysia and amazing, that can only mean two things- Malaysia's squash queen Nicole David has probably won another squash tournament after an amazing match, or the Malaysian national football team has once again amazingly defied our perceptions and fell below par on expectations (which isn't high at all, to begin with)

Now don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against our national football team, because I'm behind us all the way.
I mean we can't even qualify for the bloody Asian Cup for crying out loud (unless we're the hosts).

"Eh hallo! We're losing 5-0, so stop looking at that ah lian in the stands and please PASS la!!"
At the end of the day, as Malaysian team athletes we tend to have some sort of ego- and that's a big no no in the world of football.

You can't play as a team when there is ego, and when there's ego there's the feeling of being the best at what you do.
When you think you're the best at what you do,you tend to think the world owes you something and therefore you do whatever the hell you like.
In this case, doing whatever the hell you like is missing training so that you can party all day and all night.

I'd like to see anyone dispute my anology.
I mean, agree or not, when we Malaysians do something "great", we slap ourselves with a huge congratulations and advertise our achievment everywhere.
I know la not everyone is like that, there's always that special handful of people who are humble no matter how great they are, but who says it takes all 11 egos to destroy one football team?

Believe me. I know this because I'm also like that lah, but at least I'm not afraid to acknowledge that.
For me, after having a string of good games in pool or football, I always feel pretty high up there, but somehow I always get brought back down to earth by a bad game or two.

"Good job, mates! We only lost 2-0 today. High five!!"
Sorry I digress.
Anyway I would think, in a nutshell, that Malaysians are much better at futsal than football. I mean we did host the Futsal World Championship some time back and I guess that's pretty cool.

Speaking of futsal by the way, I was at Al-Ikhsan at The Curve on Sunday selecting a new pair of futsal shoes when I saw a few people buying the new Malaysian team jersey from Nike.

Now that was quite an amazing sight. Seriously.

Because, put it this way, our national team's old sponsor, Adidas, isn't exactly a gay sports brand. Yet nobody seemed to want to buy our national jersey back then.

But then again, our national team has always somehow managed to live up to our sponsor's slogan.

Malaysia vs New Zealand 2005
For example, Adidas' catch phrase is Impossible Is Nothing.
True whaat!!~

About a decade ago, anybody would have told you that it was impossible for Malaysia to be ranked lower than New Zealand, Fiji, the Bahamas or even Kazakhstan (immagine Borat playing football) in FIFA's Official World Rankings.

But today!! IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING!! We're ranked 157 in the world below those countries, and even below Swaziland, Bangladesh and EVEN Eritrea. I don't even know where the hell Eritrea is!!

Click to get a bigger view. Viewer discretion is advised.
Hopefully with Nike, our performance will also change, together with the catch phrase.

After all, 157 out of 207 countries isn't too bad right?
I mean we're still ranked higher than 50 countries so that's not a state of emergency yet. Well, actually 41 countries because the other 9 don't have national football teams.

So now that we're with Nike, I'm pretty sure we'll start to progress towards a different tomorrow.
Can we move further down the ranking charts, until we're ranked even lower than those countries that have never even heard of football?

JUST DO IT!!

1 Comments: