Sarawak football team – suggestions for improvements

Our Sarawak football team has never been doing so well all this while. Or to be concise, our Sarawak football is amongst the weakest, at least at present. Although I do not really follow its development, I know our Sarawak football team is in real bad shape, for quite some times already.

To really excel, it must come a long way and a great effort must be put into it. The followings are just my ideas and suggestions on improving our state football standard.

Football skills and spirits must be nurtured from early childhood, right from primary schools to secondary schools to universities. Every primary and secondary school must have a mandatory football development department where talented kids could be properly and systematically trained and groomed to become an excellent future footballers. These future talents must be identified and continuously and consistently trained until they are skillful and old enough to be absorbed into our state squad. And all those grooming must not ends here, it must continue into national and international levels.

Sarawak is a huge country with diverse resources and complex ethnicity. When it comes to selection of our state players, there has always been bias practice. Pardon me for revealing this reality. As we may be aware, the selection of our state players has been confined to players from Kuching division and a majority Malays. What about other divisions? There should be a well balance intake amongst all races within Sarawak, I mean I’m sure there’s ample talents amongst Iban, Bidayuh, Chinese, Melanaus and so forth. To be fair and to make sure Sarawak a strong football team, I would suggest that, selection of state players to include players from all divisions regardless of race. A proper selection system must be implemented, if we were to make Sarawak a football powerhouse. Do I need to elaborate further?

Players’ commitment is another factor which contributes to the strength of any football team. Without commitment, anything we undertake in life will fail, same thing with football team, as I have experienced from managing my own little football team previously. When I talk about commitment, it involves the welfare and financial status of the players. So, the welfare and finance of the players must be taken care of properly and without fail. Sarawak has been known to face this problem previously, and the effects are unforgettable to other players. So, a well managed team with a well managed financial standing stand a chance to be amongst the best teams in terms of players’ commitments.

An association that is free from outside and political influences is deemed to perform well in terms of managements. When there’s an outside interference in the affairs of any association, the management of that particular association will find it difficult to make decisions and thus affect the performance of the management, which in turn affect the performance of the team in general. So, I suggest, our Sarawak football team management must be 100% free from outside influence, especially political influences.