Sidetrack a bit...

I've always admired (sometimes even shed a few tears) at how passionate teams competing in the WC were. They really were proud of donning their national team jerseys eventhough some of them are multi millionaires. The Jules Rimet trophy is surely the Holy Grail of every footballers. The moment they step onto the pitch and their respective national anthems are playing, you can really feel their passion. And for the fans, it's really a proud moment when your national flag is flying proudly in any of the WC stadiums. Which made me think why our national team for all its past glory (qualified only for the Olympics twice), never made it to the WC finals. The national squad for the past 25 years are not really capable maybe but you have to question some of the players' passion when donning the yellow jersey. We are really lucky as now we are able to watch all 64 matches live. But enjoying watching it is one thing but doesn't it somehow ignites passion in our footballers both present and future?

Why can't we find decent enough players who can challenge the other Asian teams and qualify for the WC finals? I want to take the Slovenian analogy as an example. For a nation of just over 2 million (that's even less than KL's population), they managed to qualify for not one but two WC. And to top it all off, they qualified from Europe which is notoriously difficult to qualify from (ask England, France & Holland). Slovenia, I think is the biggest winner in world football. Zlatco Dedic? Rober Koren? Who the heck are these people? We have a population of 27 million and a government who is fully supportive of football development programs. Is it too much for us to ask for a team that can at least challenge during qualification? As it is, our world ranking is so low it beggars believe. Well, some of you might say, hey..China with 1.2 billion people didn't qualify either! True but they are up there and you certainly can't discount the possibilities that they will qualify sometime in the future. But Malaysia?

Just ask yourself how proud we will be IF we had qualified this time around and "Negaraku" is playing at one of the venue. Since we didn't, can we or rather dare we hope that come 2014 or 2020, this dream can be realised?