Remember the headlines posted here few days back, I have left out 2 of them. I will post them here, and you will get to know how both headlines are actually connected to the other.
With the Commonwealth Games going on at Melbourne, I am one of the few Malaysian sports enthusiaste who never misses the action going on at the three Astro Supersport channels. Everytime if I were to get hold of the Astro control, the only channel in my mind would be 83. And you get to press the R button to see the updates and so on. The Malaysian contingent initially targets to win 10 gold medal. But it looks like this would not materialise, unless the Malaysian badminton team manages to make a cleen sweep in every individual event.
So far, the four gold medals came from weightlifting (don't you think our Mohd. Faisal is so-so quite), lawn bowl (2 gold medals from the women's tripple and single) and badminton mixed team. The one obvious downfall is from our squash queen Nicol David, who was beaten in the semifinals by Natalie Grinham of Australia. To make things worse, our darling even lost in the battle for the bronze playoff to an unknown Shelly Kitchen of New Zealand.
How this have effected me? Well I watched Nicol lost the semifinals battle at my ex place. And that evening I was to go back home to revise. I couldn't revise let even bothered to open my notes. I guess this is how a sports freak gets dejected when your superheroes loses a game. Now I understand why Englishmen gets carried away outside the stadium when England lost at World Cup!
But overall, I am quite happy with the overall performance by the Malaysians sportsmen. We excelled in various discilpline instead of pinning hopes only to badminton. Our neighboor Singapore only had to count on Table Tennis for medals, while we have victories in weightlifting, lawnbowl, shooting, badminton, gymnastic rhytmic, diving and hockey.
I applaud the Malaysian government for pumping in millions to get our athletes excell at the international arena. Malaysia is one of the only few Asian countries who has a government support with the setting up of the National Sports Committee who is chaired by our Deputy Prime Minister. It takes another 2-3 years to see how Malaysians sports would grace the world meets and make sports freak like me even prouder!
