Dealing with shenanigans of Football
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The Minister of Sports (MOS) was recently reported to have dropped a bombshell. His kindergarten lament resonated in many arenas, but one can conclude that it was perhaps a fair comment for a man who is more comfortable in the more cloistered courts of our land than on the playing fields of paradise. But the generalisation is worth a greater discourse, with cricket’s star performers respectfully rejecting to be drawn in to advisory roles that simulate the usual charade we have been privy to!The MOS wherever he comes from, cannot merely assume a caretaker role and wish years of neglect to be transformed into a cogent active game plan that will revive Sri Lanka sports and take it to a more respectable arena of performance. If he wishes to achieve that tough but honourable task, he will certainly need more than one set of boots. The kindergarten that he is wanting to describe, begins in his own well situated cozy ivory tower along with a picturesque playing field that the last regime so assiduously created for the sportsmen in this country. If it has become a hive of back-biting and fairy-tale carrying, one must quickly take it apart and introduce a culture of sportsmanship where merit is the ultimate precursor.
Carrying tales is a result of the cloak and dagger operations that permeates all our National Sports Associations. Once elected or appointed to office, many of our sports mandarins imagine that the NSA is their private preserve without any accountability whatsoever. They believe that the right of election is to do as they please much like the country is governed today. Successive MOS have succumbed to the lure of glamour believing that they must be the arbiter of all that rules sports in this country.
Fortuitously, the present MOS dispelled this belief stating that he was ready to let his officials run the affairs of the Sports Ministry and apply his authority to matters of sports policy. So, let us begin just there. Let the MOS as a matter of policy introduce into the much-maligned Sports Law, the mandatory requirement to post on a National Sports Website, quarterly news reports based on the declared National Plan and Budget for each sport body. This bold action and facilitation will expose both the strengths and weaknesses of our NSA system and hold responsible the overseeing Sports Ministry official for his or her assigned sport. That will be the biggest contribution that the present MOS can make to clear the deck and put national sports where it belongs. It will in fact narrow the work of the Auditor General (AG) because if this sports portal will accommodate comments from sports enthusiasts and the public, it will also bring to the surface many of the frauds and miscarriages of justice that have sucked our sports into a quagmire of despair and disillusion. Once and for all the tale carriers will be upgraded to the more sublime whistle blowers, which is now a fashionable sect in the world.
Since KornerKick deals more with the shenanigans of Football, we may venture to suggest that most of the warlords of Football House must be in Moscow watching the World Cup games, courtesy FIFA. It is customary for the MOS to join these contingents as a guest of FFSL. But the President’s Counsel may not have that luxury, dealing with Provincial Councils and what not, which is certainly not a walk in the park, given that warm up to the next elections are already taking shape!
The print and electronic media have hardly anything to say about local football when there is so much to talk about the Football World’s best on center stage these days. Who cares about what our footballers are doing when Ronaldo is creating football magic with the Golden Boot in his sights or Mexico conjuring enough panache to hand Germany a defeat in the very first game they faced! Our lads are in training for the SAFF championship come September, when our talent and standards will come up for close scrutiny once again, not that there is much we can say or do, when one is languishing at # 200 in FIFA rankings.
Tale carrying aside, the many misdemeanors as well as the daylight robbery that spirited away more than Rs.25M is still a case in progress. No one knows what’s going on! So, the rumor mill speculates around conspiracy theories, while FFSL attempts to seek information from committees going as far back as 2012. That it has neglected to probe the discrepancies that the AG raised in its annual audits, the assault on the current President while he was CEO still a mystery or the complaint a Senior VP made about paying allowances on the eve elections, are all warts on a controlling body for a sport that lights up the world but casts dark shadows in our illusion of paradise.
The World Cup showcases the glamour of Football every four years in all its splendor. Among the giants, one reads of lesser stars like Senegal, Morocco, Costa Rica who dare to challenge the might of superstars. In Sri Lanka, we are all but bogged down in a one-dimensional pursuit, with the MOS inadvertently stuck in the role of MOC (no guesses!). He will now have to asses why we cannot even cheat without getting caught. He may also take a moment to ask why top teams are refusing to scrum down in a major rugby tournament. Providentially, our junior athletes show promise, so can we at least make sure that they are not cast into the wilderness, once they become seniors. In Football, we have reached the dubious status of a non-sport. Kindergarten as the youthful MOS may call it, if he reads this column. Tale carrying will cease when he finds the time to speak to the right people and ask, what really is going on!
And if the MOS is not flying out to catch the World Cup and wants to learn more as to why we must not entertain such lofty goals, we are at your service Sir.
KORNERKICK invites comments from Readers to this column.