THERE is something rotten in the state of Malaysian football. We sparkled twice with Olympian might in 1972 and 1980, but thereafter we went out with a whimper.
Today, our football is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Is our football a brief candle? Are our present players a running shadow of our Olympian squad, strutting and fretting upon the pitch and then to be heard no more?
We think otherwise.
Done right, there will be tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, as Shakespeare put it in Macbeth.
But before we do it right, what is really wrong with Malaysian football? Plenty, it seems, according to sports enthusiasts and sportswriters.
Let’s take Fifa ranking, an international rating that is relatively free of subjective criteria.
We are 167, just a point above Papua New Guinea. Even newly born and trouble-torn South Sudan is three ranks ahead. And to rub salt to our open wound, strife-ridden Myanmar is way up at 138.
If this is not enough, in a smaller pool of AFC ranking of 46 countries, Malaysia makes it only to 13. So the laments of the football enthusiasts do have a basis.
Some even say, rather sarcastically, that Malaysia can make it to the World Cup if we host the tournament.
We must not kill the semangat spirit of a World Cup dream in such a cruel fashion.
Because we think if we once had the Olympian sinew in our eleven men, they can have it again. The 1972 and 1980 squads were men of this soil, not imported or God forbid, genetically modified.
They are ordinary Malaysians who wanted to be extraordinary, and then became one. Our eleven can again.
Matthew Syed, former Commonwealth table tennis champion, writing for the BBC, lets us in to what he calls “The Iceberg Illusion”. He is referring to the one-third iceberg tip labelled “Success”.
We see it in the Olympians over and over again, from Munich through Tokyo to Beijing.
In Syed’s words, this is: the immaculate grace of the gymnasts, distance runners sustaining a tempo that seems barely believable, badminton players who can find the line with unerring accuracy, archers who can thread an arrow into a tiny target.
What lies submerged below the tip of “Success” is what we don’t see. It is what the Olympians have, and what our footballers must seek.
In Syed’s words again: The sweat, the dedication, the waking up at 5am when your body was crying out for more sleep, the failures, the good habits, the discipline, the drive, the persistence.
This is how our footballers can face the best in the world. When our eleven get to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, they will know in the deepest recesses of their hearts that the trophy is for those who were at the training pitch before the dew dried off the blades of the grass. Not for a day, or a week, or a month, or a year.
But for as long as it takes to develop the skills to bend it like Beckham or twist a header like Ronaldo.
The Olympics is, as Syed says, not just about preparing the body; it is also about preparing the mind. So is the World Cup.