The Malaysian Insider

MARCH 20 — Where were you on the night of May 16, 1992? Were you at school, at university, at home, or a little dot in your mother’s tummy?

I am not one for memories, mainly because I forgetful, but that date holds significance for me as a sports fan because it was a defining moment in badminton.

In a match that spilt over to the next day, Malaysia wrestled the Thomas Cup back from Indonesia for the first time in 25 years; and in the common rooms of the boarding school I was at, girls hugged each other in jubilance.

MARCH 7 — As I write this, Peter Crouch, former Portsmouth striker now plying his trade with Tottenham  Hotspurs, has just equalised for England against Egypt in an international friendly at Wembley. Having made his exit earlier this season, Crouch is not one of the players on the Portsmouth payroll who are still waiting for their wages in the wake of the club’s descent into administration last week.

Portsmouth’s financial failure — the first Premiership club to go into administration — comes during a month when the front pages of financial dailies were full of stories about Toyota. As much as they are strange bedfellows, there is a common theme to their mutual public shame: both were victims of strong demands for success and a desire to be the best. In other words, ambition. But in the case of Portsmouth, it isn’t just their fault. I also put the blame at the feet of the Premier League per se, who in their drive to become the best football league in the world, have transformed what is essentially a working class game into a quagmire of debt and dodgy dealings.

MARCH 1 — If I were to list all the things that make me proud about being a Malaysian, high up on that list would be our gotong royong spirit.

In the days that predate professional caterers, weddings would involve whole villages working together with kampung folk chipping in with their respective talents to pull off a spectacular show.

If you need to clear a piece of land; build a temporary shelter, clear the school grounds, help fix someone’s broken house... as Malaysians we would summon the great spirit of gotong royong.

JAN 31 – Those who can ... earn thousands of pounds every week and sign multi-million pound contracts to promote products ranging from underwear to hair gel. And those who can’t ... log on every week to change their line-up in fantasy football (or baseball, or basketball, or whatever). Yes, welcome to the rest of us.

I hereby confess that I belong to the legion of fans who have taken up fantasy sports, in particular fantasy football.

The way it works is fairly simple – you choose a line-up of eleven players before kick-off, and your players are awarded ‘points’ depending on how they perform on the field.

JAN 17 — Legend has it that many moons ago, two warring factions during the English Civil War, both severely depleted due to casualties, decided to agree to a truce of sorts, cemented by a ‘friendly’ game of football.

And so, in the chilly winter evening they took to a large field, two raggedy band of men looking clearly like they’d had enough.

As warring factions went, the game soon turned from rough-and-tumble to downright vicious.