Iraq vs Saudi Arabia? The Battled vs The Rich? The Defiant vs The Obedient?

The winning Iraqi team (Pic extracted from AFP)

I'm no football fans, as many of my friends know. However, in this particular AFC Championship, lots of hoo-ha had surrounded it, from the initial controversy sparked by the date collision between the championship and the intended friendly match between Malaysian team and MU to celebrate our nation's 50th birthday....

(by the way, why we had to succumb to such a humiliation by inviting some great team to trash us in our homeground as one of the program to celebrate our nation's 50th birthday is something really beyond my layman imagination!!!!!!. or we are listening to Stephen R. Covey preaching to WE BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND? or we think MU will play leisurely while admiring our magnificiently built stadium and listening to the ever dependable chanting of Boleh, Boleh, Boleh, Boleh, Malaysia Boleh and letting our teams scoring some goals to spare us from humiliation in respect of our birthday? ok.... back to the core issue)

..... to the surprise defeat of Australia and Japan but what intrigued me is the comparison of the two teams who made it to the final; Iraq (IR) and Saudi Arabia (SA).

1. IR is a war-torn country thanks to the world's police while SA is being protected as it's the ally of the world's police.

2. GDP : IR is not listed and SA is 25th in a 2006 World List of 183 countries.

3. SA is the world's largest oil exporter and IR, though with its huge oil reserved has to "eat his own" due to the economic sanction.

4. IR is "believed-to-be" endowed with WMD (weapon of mass destruction, such a bombastic abbrv coined by the world police) and SA is "hard-to-believe"ly crowded with ridiculously loaded Princes and Sultans (pronounced as sau-tans by the western tongue).

5. SA riches may opt to travel to Malaysia or South East Asia due to the recent phobia of Muslim travelers in US but the IR citizens have to live under the threat of their own insurgents and the "supposedly-civilian-protecting" foreign troops in their own homeland.

In the end, the comparison above draws no concrete conclusion. Like the coach of the Iraqi team said, "I have sunni. I have shii-te. I have both in my team but that's not a problem".

The unity spirit in a war-torn nation surpassed everything else. The desire to make the country proud, the pure passion and love for the sports are notably the things lacking in our Malaysian team.

You can use money to build great facilities, hire great coach (by the way, from CA's blog, I got to know that the IR coach was once Malaysian coach, how about that?) but with a fighting-spirit-lacking team, there's nothing much you can do!!!!!

And I haven't start with the hoo-ha after our embarassing run in the AFC, the resignation, the refusal to resign and stuff. Oh yeah.... why no one mention about the Malaysia vs MU match now????

I THINK FINALLY WE KNOW HOW TO UKUR BAJU DI BADAN SENDIRI or like the Chinese says, DUN HAVE BIG HEAD, DUN WEAR BIG HAT.