What has gone wrong, BAM?

What a great disappointment and what a shame. Malaysian men squad went down tamely to Japan in the Thomas Cup Group B tie last night. After Lee Chong Wei and first double Koo and Tan gave us a comfortable 2-0 lead, I thought we could have wrapped up the game easily but it was a great shame that we went down on all the remaining matches. Wong defeated, not surprising as he already past his prime but the second double and Hafiz were simply too lame, too weak and simply not up to the standards.

It was amusing or rather, a great shame, seeing how nervous our minister of sports was when he was drawing ballots in fixing the opponents for the quarter final, so worried of us facing China. And probably the minister has got some lucks, we avoided China in the quarterfinal but will probably meet up with the hot favorite if we can first get past Denmark. Can we defeat Denmark if we can’t even get past Japan?

Apart from Lee Chong Wei that we can really proud about, I don’t see anyone else has the same caliber to fight against the best of the world. Chong Han is long past his prime and Hafiz is simply so erratic and for all the money the government pumped in, putting up world class training facilities and line of foreign coaches, we seem not capable of producing a bunch of good badminton players that could perform well at top levels. What has gone wrong?

We need a miracle to lift the Thomas Cup again this year. The head coach Rashid has urged his players to emulate the success of the 92-Men squad which went down 2-3 to Korean in the group stage but fought like injured tiger to win the trophy. I guess Rashid is in the right position to say that because he was one of the players lifted the Thomas Cup in 1992, but he is over optimistic, I suppose .

But for most of badminton fans who watched the Group B match between Malaysia-Japan, we know that it would be extremely difficult for us even to get past the Danes, as our apparent weakness in the second and third singles and second double were made known to the rest of the world during the match with Japan last night.