Answer lies with FAM, not coaches

YET another early end to yet another campaign and for the FA of Malaysia, it’s back to the drawing board.

Malaysia not only failed to make the Asean Championship final but didn’t even advance past the group stage and for national coach B. Sathianathan, the end is near.

He failed to meet the target, even if it was sprung on him virtually at the last minute, but as a professional coach, Sathianathan has to accept the consequences and move on.

One gets the feeling that Sathianathan is feeling a sense of injustice as his achievements — winning the Merdeka Tournament last year and finishing runners-up this year — have been forgotten.

And there is also the fact that Malaysia’s world ranking has “improved” to 150 from the 171 it was several months ago.

Against that is the record of failing to guide Malaysia to the 2007 Sea Games semi-finals — the first time since the 1999 edition — and the 2008 Asean Championship last four for the first time since 1998.

So Sathianathan can’t really complain and, in fact, should have expected this from FAM.

After all, the hiring and firing of coaches is something FAM is extremely good at and the accompanying chart shows just how adept the national body is.

Twelve coaches have been at the helm of the national team over the last 23 years while Sir Alex Ferguson has been Manchester United manager for 22 years.

Still, we shouldn’t compare the job of national coach of Malaysia with that of Ferguson’s but the fact that eight of the 12 coaches were hired and fired over the last 14 years shows FAM’s fickleness.

Among those fired was Frenchman Claude Le Roy, widely reckoned as the finest coach a developing football nation could hope to land. Yet, he was sacked after the 1995 Chiangmai Sea Games.

To FAM’s credit, it has never been stingy when it comes to getting the best of coaches for the national team and even when it went local, Abdul Rahman Ibrahim and Norizan Bakar were hired after some impressive results with their respective league teams.

But their results were only slightly better than that of Sathianathan’s and after so many coaches, FAM should sit back and think before embarking on hiring another expensive foreigner.

It is a fact that Malaysia’s football fortunes really turned sour due to match-fixing, which had spread like cancer and culminated with the bribery crackdown of 1994-95.

Le Roy was a victim of that but in football terms, that was a generation ago and surely, we should have moved on.

Vietnam’s domestic league has also been plagued by corruption and yet, the national team remains a force at the Asean level while Malaysia isn’t.

The reason is simple — the game in Vietnam is not about how to serve the national association’s affiliates but about becoming a major footballing nation.

No doubt, there is politics in Vietnamese football but not to the extent of what is prevalent in the Malaysian game where the interests of the state FAs are protected no matter how inefficient they are.

The players in the Asean Championship are all products of a failed system and that is the reason why Malaysia will never be a force in Asean, let alone Asian, football again.

The players too need not feel any remorse, forget about the Asean Championship and start preparing for the start of the 2009 domestic season as that is exactly the sentiment of the officials.

Sathianathan, in a rather simplistic way, blamed the 3-2 defeat to Vietnam as Malaysia’s end but in reality, the end came a long time ago when FAM and the state FAs refused to blame themselves.