RIFLE RANGE BOY

I used to be fascinated with the term 'money laundering'. At face value, it looked simple enough - to cleanse money obtained via unsavoury means and to put them in circulation whilst giving them a legitimate source of origin. Was it a coincidence that Al Capone used a laundromat to store and 'cleanse' his ill-gotten gains during Prohibition?   As the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup is in progress, another word frequently mentioned is 'sports washing'. Traditionally sports have been utilised to cement friendships between nations. It has also been used to spur nationalism among its own citizens. For years despotic regimes whitewash their sins with the glamour of sports. During the 1936 Olympics, Hitler tried to paint a new image of a rejuvenated Germany after the humiliating defeat in the trench War and to prove his supremacist Aryan race theory. Sadly, Jesse Owen's achievement simply threw dirt on Hitler's face. Then it was the Argentinan junta who tried to whi...

© FIFA Almost like a ritual, it turns up regularly every four years in the Northern summer. Nobody bothers about the Southern hemisphere anyway. One says that games are on this summer, it refers to summer in the Northern hemisphere, not South. Many a couch potato who had seen better times at running after a ball, all turn out to be expert football pundits and fantastic football strategist; many times over than the world's highest paid football managers. These podgy characters start their day in the afternoon with puffy red eyes and husky voices after staying up the whole night to the wee hours of the morning at nightspots cheering for teams whose players would not even be able to place our country on the globe. My exposure to this most loved started way back in 1978 when Argentina hosted this quadrennial fiesta. My mathematics teacher, Mr Chang, besides teaching us probabilities and possibilities, he also exposed us to some of the FIFA world cup related trivia. Brazil, at th...

How Malaysia never reached the World Cup (Harimau Malaya's 40-year chronicle of failure) Author: Lucius Maximus With such a depressing title, as expected, one can only read about heartaches and heartaches of the Malaysian fans over the 4 decades as the administrators of the national football team made more and more promises in vain to bring the national team to the World Cup finals. We, the children of the 70s had many fond moments, glued to the radio sets visualising in our minds how our national team was then giving a good fight and even defeating many teams which are considered powerhouses of Asian football - e.g. South Korea, Japan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia. If we were lucky, we would have the pleasure of Malaysia pulverising minnows like the Philippines (15-0) and Burma in a padi-field like muddy fields of Stadium Merdeka. In fact, there was an urban legend then that Malaysia had a regular in-house bomoh (shaman) who had a 100% success rate in bringing in the rain. You see, ...

A Brazilian soccer fan cries as she watches her team  get beat during a live telecast of the semifinals  World Cup soccer match between Brazil and Germany,  in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Tuesday, July 08, 2014 Now that the nights are spent in slumber land, the eyes are becoming less congested and the mush in the brain is slowly clearing up, I can write. It is amazing how a game, after all a game, can exert so much effect on events around the world. Perhaps, it was meant to be thus. Average Joe being side-tracked by events that are clearly not going to determine the fate of mankind, as, they, the capitalists create a sense of urgency and fascination amongst the lay people and laugh all the way to the bank. If not, how would you expect a supposedly non profit organisation like FIFA to have 5 billion USD in their account, leaving a trail of heartaches as they count their loot. And the money is development of world football, really? Soccer is just another tool f...