Malaysia Badminton Going Down

After the much prepared Beijing Olympic Games, where Malaysia won a Silver medal from Lee Chong Wei, the rest of the team's performance could only be describe as satisfactory at most. Since then few of our veterans like Wong Choong Hann, Lee Wan Wah, Choong Tan Fook had announced their retirement plan from the games and move on to the next path of life.

So issue now is that are there any capable replacement for the retirement bound players? Who do we have to replace those veterans? For Men's double we've seen a few capable pairs to taking over in a year or two given the right exposure to the international stage, but we hardly see any Single player to support Lee Chong Wei's sole heroic performances in the open tournament.

Why is this happening here? Why other Badminton strengthold doesn't face such problem? Malaysia always has a team like Team 2010-12, Project 2012 etc, but all these players only restricted to local tournaments, and sparing among themselve most of the time. How many world class sparing partners Malaysia has in this sense?

Answer is none! That's what causing the breakdown in finding a capable replacement for veterans. It's already a norm for Malaysia to always depends on the few players to lead the country's charges, and when one go, they only let the youth to come up and start from then! That's why we are so lacking behind in youth players in international stage, and we always under perform on international open tournaments.

I think BAM should totally change their attitude and method, just like what is needed for UMNO now, a total change of management system, and let all capable talents to participating in all tournaments to gain as much exposure. That's the best way of sustaining the standard set by current and previous players.