Apparently, The Merdeka Football Tournament Is Back On

Published by simon on August 26, 2006

A few days ago, while flipping through the sports pages in our local newspapers, in between the big articles (with huge headlines) of the ‘in‘ sports like English football, Formula One and pro tennis, I saw a minuscule write-up about the Merdeka Football Tournament currently held somewhere in KL.

Wow, I didn’t even know they brought this tournament after so many years. I remember the last few years they held the tournament (late 80’s? Early 90’s?) the attendance was so poor the organizers made a loss. The report mentioned that the match attracted a respectable crowd of 20,000, which is quite good considering anyone with Astro can watch world class EPL football as an alternative. Plus, this match in KL was played in about an inch of rainwater, so I’m thinking Brazilian-style free-flowing samba football may not be on show there.

Back in the 70’s, I vaguely remember the Pestabola Merdeka (as it was called then) was THE premier regional invitational football competition in Southeast Asia, where they could attract top teams like Burma (Myanmar), Thailand and Asian teams like South Korea (which Malaysia could regularly beat back then) and Japan.

I won’t go into the whole Malaysian-football-was-so-good-then thing here, but this was the team that qualified for the Moscow Olympics in 1980 (but ultimately didn’t go, ask your parents why). Then in the 80’s, the organizers starting inviting European and South American B clubs, in addition to African nations. Of course Malaysia couldn’t dream of bringing the likes top clubs here, but the introduction of these unknown club teams sort of made the tournament lose its luster a bit, it also coincided with the decline of the national team.

At that time, the FAM introduce the Malaysian Tigers, which was a youth team (I think it was U-23) to expose younger players to international football. I remember the format of Pestabola Merdeka was that there were 2 groups of 4 teams each, with a cross over semifinals. The two national teams were separated in the two groups, but I remember that most of the time both teams would finish in 3rd place in their respective groups!

Looking at the papers today, it looks like they’ve kept the tournament to a modest single group of 4 teams, with neighbouring teams making up the numbers. These days, the AFF Tiger Cup is undoubtedly the premier regional footie tournament, followed by the SEA Games football.

The revived Merdeka Tournament may help a bit in improving our 148th placing in the FIFA rankings (or make it worse, I dunno), but for those who remember the old version, it reminds us why local football is fighting a losing battle against cable sports, EPL, the Internet and a lack of talent.

Technorati Tags: Merdeka, Malaysia, football, bolasepak, Pestabola Merdeka, FAM, Merdeka tournament

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