Jerry Dinesh Part 3 - The National Team
In the final part of the interview, Jerry Dinesh gives his frank assessment of what's holding the national team back, before reflecting on why, after years of setbacks, he's more optimistic about Malaysian futsal's future than ever.
The national team sit 79th in the world, some way behind Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. How do you think the national team can start to improve?
Having watched this for close to twenty-six years now, both as a player and now for a good stretch as a coach, I think we've had plenty of good people come through the administration, but there's been a lack of continuity in the product. Historically, everything has been planned a year at a time; you get to the end of a season and then you're starting again from scratch for the next one, and that's not the right way to build anything.
Right now, the committee I sit on isn't functioning within FAM because of the scandal, though it should resume in September. Whether I'm reappointed or not doesn't matter to me, I care about the sport, not the position, but what we discussed in our last few meetings was exactly this: we can't keep planning one year at a time. Our broadcast partnership opens a door, because we know we can't just sit on MPFL for another year, we need competitions underneath it too, an under-19 tier and further down. A proper calendar built out from what we've achieved this year commercially should raise viewership and value across the board, because once people are watching multiple connected products on the same channel, you capture a much wider audience. That kind of continuity from the federation side is also what will start to fix the national team.
We can't keep changing national coaches every year either. A lot of good people have made good decisions individually, but there's been no connectivity between them. We have Spanish and Brazilian coaches leading our top clubs and a different profile of coach at national level, and the story simply doesn't join up. What's needed is a strong technical framework linking FAM with the clubs on the ground, so there's a shared game model and player development pathway that means players arrive at national level already carrying the right foundations. Right now it's ad hoc: a coach comes in for a season, trains the group for a couple of weeks around a tournament, and then it's over, and nothing can really be built in that time.
I don't say this to disrespect local coaches, I'd be disrespecting myself if I did, but I think we have to be honest that we don't yet have the experience within the country to do this alone. We need a genuine development coach, not a short-term performance coach, brought in for a proper length of time. Indonesia is the example to look at: they've kept the same man in charge, trusted him, resourced him, and let him work all the way down through the grassroots. I think our commercial plan is currently ahead of theirs, but on the football side, we're behind, and it shows.
I was honestly disappointed by the national team's most recent performance. At times it looked like we didn't know what we were doing, and I don't think you can blame any one person for that.
