these foreign athletes are an initiative by the government.
the problem with foreign talent
logically speaking, if you want a player to improve, you send him to train in a place where the standard of the sport is higher than at home. if you send an athlete out to a country where the standard is lower, he will probably get worse, rather than for that individual to raise the standard of the entire country.
for example, if steven gerrard were to move to the middle east, japan or USA to play for bigger bucks, will the standard of the sport there improve? probably just good for the glamour, but mr. gerrard will also get worse.
so logically speaking, what we should be doing, rather than to bring the WORLD into SINGAPORE, we should send SINGAPOREANS out into the WORLD. it is quite egotistical and arrogant to believe that the former could actually work out.
herein lies a big problem. if you send singaporeans overseas, will they come back? nowadays it is hard to find a high-profile cabinet minister who might have still been here had he not been bonded by the government and SAF.
the second problem is loyalty. this not only defies logic, but it defeats its own purpose. do you expect a person who is not even loyal to his own country of birth to be loyal to singapore?
we need to ask ourselves a serious question.
is singapore winning medals more important than singaporeans succeeding? clearly the emphasis is on achievement rather than the people. and this underlines the problem with singapore; it is always about the country, and never about the people. singapore has no love for those who don't achieve.
Goal 2010
Goal 2010 is absolutely ridiculous. It is just plain stupid. Football is not the same as athletics, swimming, table tennis or badminton. it is a
team sport. and that brings about some implications.
In football it doesn't matter how good your country is. the only thing that matters in football is the ranking. there is no point in improving your team when other teams are improving at a faster rate.
maybe our policymakers don't understand how the world cup is played (maybe they don't even understand football). for ASIAN nations in the world cup, only four asian teams will make it into the world cup finals. a fifth spot in the finals will go to the winner of a playoff between the fifth asian team and the top team from oceania (which is always australia).
you can have big dreams for singapore. but qualification is simple, we have to be better than
iran,
south korea,
saudi arabia,
japan and
australia. nowadays even iraq and uzbekistan are entering the fold. if we are better than only some of them, it will go down to the luck of the draw.
right now we can hardly top ASEAN, and for the past decade, there has been no trend that suggests we are even moving in the right direction.
there are some singaporeans (who don't understand sports) who cut our athletes alot of slack. but what kind of mentality do you bring into a sport? "there is nothing to lose", or "failure is not an option"? it is obvious who has the greater hunger and desire.
for your information, malaysia has been importing players even before singapore. but they has since abandoned this plan. simply because it doesn't work. and you can imagine the pride of the people when their malaysian born and bred badminton player whips our indonesian lady killer. i suppose he is a player, but in a different sense.
in this respect, singaporeans are a bunch of losers. because we don't know how to fight. we don't know how to win. we only know how to roll over.
the government initiates the influx of foreigners. whatever the government does is financed by tax. we, the people, pay taxes. in essence, we the people are paying these athletes to screw up. now consider this:
if a local athlete puts his blood, sweat and tears into the sport, but fails, we applaud him. what happens to a foreigner, who has entered a contract to win medals, who has migrated into our country for the sole purpose of winning games, who fails?
