Friends Of STAR

Reading the article in the STAR Online yesterday regarding Malaysia’s rugby performance during the Commonwealth Games makes me wonder, does one failure makes everything gone bad?

Being involved in the international rugby scene as a administrator, I believe that one failure makes us think back where we went wrong.

Let us look at the Malaysian’s rugby 7s team set up, as far as I know, this set up has been ‘privatized’ by a strong financier from one of the State RU in Malaysia, which is run by a big corporation. This set up has brought over a lot of players from abroad to play professionally and based on iRB’s regulation, some of these players can don Malaysian colours, which stated that a player can play for a Union if the stay in a certain country for 3 years continuously.

Based on this, Malaysia has done quite well in the iRB 7s series, because ¾ of the 7s squad hails from Kuala Suva and Telok Nadi.

However, when it comes to multi sports carnival, SEA Games, Asian Games, Commonwealth Games and The Olympics, a player needs to be citizen of the said country in order to represent the country.

Let’s not be like our southern neighbour. Malaysia has a population of 25 million and counting. I bet it is not difficult to find twelve 6’3” ... 200lbs … lad who can run 100m in 14s. But then rugby is not all about size. 90% of rugby is about brain. My friend told me once, to win a rugby game, you need to be a good chess player.

In my humble opinion, STAR can be the centre of Rugby Excellence to produce recruits for the National call up. In fact over the years, STAR has produced National players that can form 3 of these 7s squad team

We’ve already have Naha (En Naharuddin) and A’ar (En Khairul Azhar) in STAR which is an awesome foundation for STAR’s rugby future.

This year, we managed to win a National Tournament after 29 year hiatus. Winning is easy, what we need is, we need to sustain this winning pattern.

How about the players from this winning team, will they carry on playing rugby after the school years? Based on history, only 20% of these players will carry on playing. If they were to carry on, will they still be playing together in STAROBA team, or are they going to join the bigger teams, like Cobra and NS Wanderers.

I think with proper planning, STAR can create the future of rugby in Malaysia. However, we need dedicated individuals to make this happen.

Are we ready to give back to School … and Malaysia?