There’s more to this situation than meets the eye — there’s political jockeying going on, and yes, more than a smidgen of xenophobia. I am disappointed but not surprised that the AFC has not called out Khairy Jamaluddin over his own unsuitability for the position he holds in FAM: he’s an MP, the son-in-law of the current Malaysian prime minister, and the deputy youth chief of a major party in the current ruling coalition. How does this not constitute political interference in football?

A mention on the Malaysian Cup here, it will bring back a lot of memories (the newspapers do at times write about the good old days when Singapore was once part of it, and that was where the rivalry really began against our neighbour up north). I was from the generation not being exposed to the whole thing (because we already have our own professional league since the 90s) and so the newspapers and my father’s personal memories made up for it.

The rivalry between Malaysia and here in Singapore is something like England and Scotland (the whole ‘Auld Enemy’ thing) and as we saw during Euro 2008, a revival of the Austria-Germany rivalry. Though in this case between Singapore and Malaysia, it’s the case of the small brother winning over the big brother in recent times. Not that I am bragging but it’s a fact.

The rivalry (like the Austria-Germany one at Euro 2008) was revived during a regional football tournament last year. In this tournament – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_ASEAN_Football_Championship

The Malaysia Cup I was talking about earlier – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Cup

‘If teh Malaysian football team shows a marked improvement in the next few years, then you can expect certain European football associations to take notice.’
Who knows. This will be something interesting to follow in the long term.

I don’t see how this is going to be a good thing. It’s always helpful to have some foreigners to help your talented players learn a new way or style to use if their old styles get sussed out. It’s also been thoroughly proven to be quite beneficial to African national teams who have been able to send their more talented players off to teams that can afford to give them top quality education and training, which helps their national teams do better. It also helps flow some money back to those African nations to reinvest in infrastructure of their own.

England’s national team isn’t being destroyed by dirty foreigners. The reason they failed was a bad coach, a lack of talented individuals due to inadequate youth training academies, too many egos, an inability to think outside the tactics box when necessary (something quite probably traceable to the fact that the English players refuse to play outside England and thus learn new ways of doing things or to learn from their foreign teammates), and expectations of quality from a very loud and whiny press and populace who don’t seem to realize that they haven’t invested enough into the infrastructure to produce top-notch talent on a world-class level. Oh, that and the fact that they were up against Russia and Croatia, who turned out to actually be pretty good, so sloppy play was not going to help them beat teams with that much momentum.

Sepp Blatter’s idea is idiotic in many respects, but will be attractive to countries like Malaysia and England to indulge the racism that underlies xenophobia and hurt their country and other countries in the process.