That Horrendous Challenge!!

I only recently managed to watch ESPN to see how badly injured Cech sustained and to my horror, that was a murder attempt!

I, as a paramedic, was disgusted with the report of the incident when I read it on paper. And with the delay of advanced medical care of 30mins, Cech could’ve died! A depressed skull fracture can greatly affect the brain and it is just a matter of how early scans can detect bleeding to the brain. And we all know that a bleeding brain can lead to death.

Knee to the head is obviously an intention to hurt another professional and I strongly believe that the culprit should receive a red card and a two-month suspension. Time and time again my Singapore StarSports and ESPN pundits debated on this. I have to side with Shebby Singh when he rebutted Paul that a genuine attempt for the ball is when U stick out Ur boots with the studs aimed for the ball.

With Reading taking out BOTH goalkeepers, it seemed as good as unsportsmanship-like play. I may not side Chelsea but I do feel how frustrated Mourinho felt when justice wasn’t there for him.
“Carlo Cudicini has slammed referee Mike Riley for failing to send off Stephen Hunt and Ibrahima Sonko for the challenges that hospitalised him and fellow Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech.

Cudicini was knocked out and swallowed his tongue after Reading defender Sonko collided with him in Saturday’s 1-0 Premiership victory at the Madejski Stadium.

Riley took no action over the incident and initially did not even stop the game, with the Royals nearly equalising while the Italian lay unconscious in the penalty area.

“I am sure that if a collision like Sonko’s with me had happened in the middle of the pitch, he would have got a red card,” Cudicini told the Daily Express. “But the referee did not even blow for a foul.”

Misplaced Pride…

Misplaced pride. I feel that this is something that quite a lot of the people of my race are guilty of. Each time when someone from the Malay community achieves something, the rest of the community will swell up in pride and say, “Hey, that anak Melayu achieves something. We sure are damn proud of you son.”

While there is nothing wrong with sharing the pride of an achiever, I felt that it is ironic that that’s all we ever do. Share that person’s pride. We never thought of using the achiever as a source of inspiration to push us off and achieve something of our own. We never considered that perhaps we too, can do something that we can personally be proud of ourselves for.

There are still too many Malays that are trapped in the vicious cycle; the cycle that involves poverty, lacking of education and coming from broken homes. While I do agree that as a community, we are achieving more and more but nevertheless there are also more and more of our people that got struck down by social problems. These social problems tend to have a spillover effect on the next generation. The parents didn’t not learn well enough from their own errors and as such had not been able to educate or equip their children sufficiently for their children to break out of the cycle. Again, these children got trapped in the same cycle, sometimes shouldering even bigger problems than their predecessors.

We face a multitude of social problems: pre-marital sex, gangsterism, poverty, lack of family planning, lack of financial planning, early marriages that resulted in divorces and so on. Many of these problems are not new and have been ongoing since I could remember.

There are also psychological problems that I feel we also face. We tend to belittle ourselves. We claimed that Singapore is a Chinese country and as such, we are resigned to our destiny of always being marginalized. Many of us never thought of exploring the vast possibilities should we dare to dream, aspire and lift a finger to work towards those goals. Our own mentality had shot ourselves in the foot. Even before starting out, we had limit ourselves and keep ourselves constrained in our small, little box of the world. After that, we feel pathetic of ourselves and our state and we felt that it is justified.

I feel that the community need to first come out in the open and admit to the problems instead of pretending that they are not happening. The community need to confront these problems, not face the other way and hope that these problems will go away on its own. These problems occurs in cycles and they will never go away as long as we remain oblivious. There’s nothing to be ashamed of by admitting that we have problems so long we are working on the solutions. It’s more embarrassing to not do anything about it.

True, we need to continue to be proud of those amongst us who succeeded. We should share their pride. We shouldn’t however, just stop there. We should learn from this person’s success and cultivate the belief that we too, can succeed just like this person. We should use his success to break our perceived limitations and spur ourselves to a new height in our lives. We should believe in the possibility of us sharing his fate instead of dismissing it without even trying.

I believe that our community is not as marginalized as we want to believe. Every nation and society will experience some form of marginalization or another. In fact, I believe Singapore is the closest to meritocracy as you can get. There are indeed ample opportunities that are fair bait to anyone regardless of race. There are people from other countries who suffer from worse marginalization than what we (perceive to) experience here.

If this was a Chinese country, why then did the consecutive winners of Singapore Idols happen to be Malays? The masses believe and knows a talent when they see one. They do not see it from the skin colour nor the language that person speak. Stop giving ourselves excuses that causes us to be complacent and make us sit in our hole without ever moving from that spot in life. To sit there and watch watch the world around us evolving and changing, at the expense of us becoming obsolete and irrelevant.

So wake up from our lulling sleep. Challenge ourselves and believe.