Actually, if you all want to point fingers around blaming someone for the overall result of our U21, I'm not sure we're able to point at anyone in this country at the moment.
There is no one pointing fingers as of yet, which is a very Malaysian disease I hope to see purged at least in BB. LA-Phenomenal is well within his rights to bring up his concerns with the U21s, and it's great to see his concerns being addressed by the U21 manager.
On the deterioration of the U21s, it has more to do with the improvement of other countries and lack of user base for us. We can go toe to toe with countries with a similar amount of active managers, beat them even, but when it comes to bigger countries the numbers do matter. Look at the Phillipines, they were below us when they started off and now they've gone on from strength to strength. And it is no fault of ours either, they've simply increased their user base while having the active managers play ball with shortlisted trainees. Now, we have around 100 active managers, they have 1,000.
This season alone, we feared a shortage of trainees for the U21s. But it turned out to be a shortage of trainers that threatened to derail our hopes. So, it has to be surmised that we should address the most pressing problem first before moving on to others. Somehow, we have to dig out more trainers to pick up our trainees. And I'm willing to even go foreign to search out trainers who will contribute to our NT. If there are not enough local trainers, I will search out foreign managers in lower leagues to train our trainees, with the promise that they WILL be selected for the U21 squad. At this stage, it is a win-win for us. We get a constant source of trainees and they get a NT flag on their trainees to help boost the price or feel proud of.
Criticism is useless without ideas for improvement, and I hope this is one of many ideas that can take off to turn our fortunes. I do not know who the next U21 manager will be, but I know as much that I for one will not be running for the post. Any contribution I can give, will be as a concerned Malaysian. Anyone else with a gameplan?