SEA Games: Zhang Guirong wins shot-put gold; men’s 4x100m team wins silver in new national record time

Shot putter Zhang Guirong may have won a second athletics gold for Singapore at the SEA Games today but it was the men’s national 4x100m quartet that was the talk of the town after their surprise silver in the event.

Gary Yeo, Muhammad Elfi Mustapa, Lee Cheng Wei and Muhammad Amirudin Jamal ran the relay of their lives when they clocked a new national record time of 39.82sec to finish second behind Thailand on the final day of the SEA Games track and field competition.

The time was 0.18sec faster than the national mark of 40.10sec which was set at the 2007 Korat Games. Of that quartet, only Gary Yeo is the sole surviving member while Poh Seng Song, who was also part of that quartet, was a reserve today.

Indonesia was third while Laos finished fourth in the four-country race.

The silver will  be particularly sweet to Amirudin who narrowly missed out on the 100m bronze by 0.01sec on Monday.

And you can also be  sure that the achievments will also be gleefully used by embattled Singapore Athletic Association president Loh Lin Kok as ammunition to rebut a recent spate of criticisms of his administration from top sporting officials.

On Tuesday, during a Team Singapore gathering at the Singapore embassy in Vientiane, Sports Minister Dr Vivian Balakrishnan had said that the SAA needs to do an internal house cleaning.

“Without athletics firing on all cylinders, Singapore’s final performance in multi-sport events will always be hamstrung,” he said in one of the strongest rebukes of the SAA in recent years.

Yesterday, Teo Ser Luck, the Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Community Development, Youth and Sports, fired another salvo at the SAA.

Speaking after James Wong’s victory in the discus, he said he was disappointed that in the flagship sport of every multi-sport Games, Singapore are standing still.

“I can’t say we are a sporting nation until we sort things out in athletics,” he said pointedly.

“We have a strong swimming tradition which also has a renewal process. I need athletics to step up.”

One athlete who certainly stepped up today was  Zhang.

The 31-year-old shot-putter whose testy relationship with the SAA over the past few years coincided with a massive slump in form, bounced back from the wilderness in style by capturing the women’s gold today.

The China-born naturalised citizen, who holds the national record of 18.57m but was a major flop at last year’s Beijing Olympics with her best effort of 16.23m, threw an improved 17.12m today to successfully defend her crown.

Zhang’s win means that Singapore came away from the last day fo the track and field competition with a total haul of two golds and a silver, a paltry collection of medals considering that 45 gold medals were at stake in athletics in Vientiane.

Singapore finished seventh out of nine countries, just above Laos and Cambodia who both won a bronze each. Thailand was the overall champion with 14 golds.

Meanwhile, the national U-23 football team won the bronze for the second consecutive Games when they beat host Laos 3-1 in the third-fourth place play-offs in front of a 20,000-strong partisan crowd.

Singapore, meek and outclassed 1-4 by Vietnam in the semi-finals, bounced back with a more positive performance against Laos. They were also clearly the superior side.

Khairul Nizam, Fazli Ayub and Fadhil Noor scored to give Singapore a 3-0 lead before Lamnao Singto pulled one back in the 88th minute.

However, it must be said that the consolation goal inspired the Laotians to go on a late charge and caused Singapore to experience some nerve-wracking moments during the seven minutes of stoppage time.

Singapore also won a silver in the women’s 9-ball in  cuesports and in women’s badminton doubles

Charlene Chai tried her best but was unable to stop reigning world champion Rubilyn Amit of the Philippines from winning 7-3.

Singapore pair Yao Lei and Shinta Mulia Sari were also out of their depth as they were outclassed 12-21, 11-21 by Malaysia’s Chin Ee Hui and Wong Pei Tty in the badminton doubles final.

Yours in sport

Singapore Sports Fan

SEA Games: Tears for U-23 football team, joy for shooters and bittersweet day for swimmers

Singapore won two more individual golds in swimming this evening but in a surprise twist, star swimmer Quah Ting Wen, was not the recipient of either.

Instead, it was Singapore Sports School students Amanda Lim and Tao Li who delivered the goods in the 50m freestyle and 200m butterfly finals respectively.

Constantly in the shadow of Ting Wen, her more illustrious peer, 16-year-old Amanda finally emerged as a star in her own right this evening when she defeated Ting Wen in the 50m freestyle.

In a repeat of their clash in the same event at the Asian Youth Games in July, Amanda found herself neck-to-neck with Ting Wen in the first 25m.*

But this time, the Singapore Sports School student, who is coached by Peter Churchill, gradually pulled away from her arch-rival to touch home in a new SEA Games record time of 25.82sec.* The time was 0.31sec faster than the old record of 26.13sec.  Ting Wen was second in 25,88sec.

However, Amanda’s time will not be a new national record as the time was slower than her national mark of 25.38sec which she had set in the semi-finals during the  AYG.*

It was then Tao Li’s turn to shine. And the 19-year-old Singapore Sports School student was simply in a class of her own as she defeated Malaysia’s Khoo Cai Lin by four bodylengths in the 200m butterfly final. Her time of 2:13.489 also broke the SEA Games record of 2:14.11.

Tao Li’s gold was her fourth individual title of the SEA Games – she had also won the 100m and 200m backstroke and 100m butterfly before tonight’s final — and her fifth in total.  She had also helped Singapore to win in the 4x100m medley relay.

Ting Wen, on the other hand, couldn’t end her Vientiane campaign on a golden note.

Looking visibly tired, the 17-year-old Raffles Institution (Junior College) student seemed to run out of steam in the 400m individual medley, her final event of the Games. She eventually finished second in 4min 56.32sec, more than a second behind Thailand’s Nattanan Jung-kra-jan, who won in 4:55.07. Koh Hui Yi clinched the bronze with her time of 4:56.73.

Nor could Singapore end the swimming competition with a sweep of all the relays. Despite their best efforts, the quartet of Rainer Ng, Ng Jia Hao, Clement Lim and Russell Ong could not win relay gold No. 6 in the men’s 4x100m medley relay They took the silver instead in 3:44.15, behind winners Indonesia, who clocked a new Games record of 3:41.72.

But there was at least a small consolation for the quartet – their time was a new national record, slicing four seconds off the 3:48.78 that they had set at the World Championships in Rome in August.

Meanwhile, our shooters continued their golden run by winning a sixth gold. The team of Gai Bin, Poh Lip Meng and Nigel Lim won the 50m pistol team event – their second team gold after the 10m air pistol team event – with a combined score of 1,646. Vietnam (1,618) and Thailand (1615) came in second and third respectively.

But there were tears on the football pitch as Singapore’s hopes of reaching the final of the SEA Games football competition ended with a 1-4 drubbing by Vietnam in the semi-finals.

Singapore took the lead in the 27th minute through striker Khairul Nizam but Vietnam overturned the deficit into a 2-1 lead by half-time, thanks to goals from Phan Thanh Binh and Phan Tien Thanh. As Singapore chased the game, they were constantly hit on the break by the speedy Vietnamese.

It was no surprise then that the Republic went on to concede a third goal in the 69th minute. To rub salt into Singapore’s wounds, Vietnam scored their final goal in the third minute of stoppage time.

In athletics, discus thrower Wan Lay Chi became the third Singaporean to finish fourth in the track and field competition after Stefan Tseng (men’s triple jump) and Amirudin Jamal (men’s 100m). She threw 46.09m.

Yours in sport

Singapore Sports Fan

(*Note: My thanks to sl for pointing out some factual inaccuracies in my initial report. I have amended them since.  – SSF)

Two rays of hope for the young aspiring Singapore Chinese footballer?

The report:

The Sunday Times (25 Jan 2009) carried a pretty good interview with national coach Raddy Avramovic, in which he revealed his plans to wield the axe on a number of Lions and replace them with up to six new faces.

It has to be done, he explained , simply because he feels that time has caught up with ‘this generation of players.’

According to the report, insiders say that the new faces include Young Lions centre-back Afiq Yunos, midfielder Gabriel Quak and strikers Eugene Luo and Khairul Nizam.

Some may wonder at the timing of the move to bring in new faces espeically since Singapore is now in the midst of its Asian Cup qualifying campaign. Apart from hosting the tournament once in the 80s, the Lions have never qualified for the competition on their own merit before.

But Avramovic felt that it is the right time to do so. “Even if we beat Jordan, it is still the right time to bring in the young faces and give them a feel of international football… to let them learn from the experienced players and understand the pressure international football brings,” he said. 

You can click here for the full article.

My thoughts:

Two things struck me instantly when I read the above-mentioned article.

Firstly, the report named only four of the ‘five or six young players’ that Avramovic plans to introduce into the national squad.

This, to me, is a strong hint that the remaining two players are likely to be naturalised citizens.

If that turns out to be true, then it means that the Lions will now have 10 naturalised citizens in their ranks.

The current batch of naturalised citizens includes defenders Precious Emuejeraye and Daniel Bennett, midfielders Mustafic Fahrudin, John Wilkinson and Shi Jiayi, and strikers Agu Cashmir, Aleksandar Duric and  Qiu Li.

Assuming that the Lions squad is 22-strong, this means that half of the Singapore team will be made of foreign talents. But I have a feeling this number will drop to eight eventually. 

I am working on the assumption that Precious will probably be axed from the team eventually while the ageing Duric – he is 39 this year – will likely have to call time on his international career if he wants to prolong his club playing career.

The other thing that struck me: the fact that two of the new faces are Singaporean Chinese players.

You cannot imagine how pleasantly surprised I was to see the names “Eugene Luo’ and ‘Gabriel Quak” in the article.

After all, there has not been a Singaporean Chinese player in the Lions first 11 since midfielder Goh Tat Chuan was axed from the national squad by Avramovic in 2006.

There are two Chinese players – Shi Jiayi and Qiu Li – but they are China -born naturalised citizens.

Considering the fact that 76% of the Singapore population is Chinese, this current dearth of local Chinese players in the national squad makes for a pretty ridiculous and embarrassing situation for the Singapore football fan and the Football Association of Singapore.

Hopefully, the arrival of Luo and Quak is a sign that things are about to change. The fact that they’ve been called up to the national squad will hopefully inspire more Chinese boys to follow their footballing dreams.

By the way, the reason why I am so cheered by Luo and Quak’s call-ups is not because I am Chinese myself.

It is because the dearth of local Chinese footballers means that the FAS has, in the past, only been able to tap on 24% of the Singapore population in its search for local footballing talent.

This itself has had severe repercussions for the progress of Singapore football.

After all, if your pool of talent is already so small, logically, it just means that you’re going to hit a wall sooner or later. The fact that the FAS has been recruting foreign talents to play for the Lions means that it hit that wall a long time ago.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the fact that Luo is a striker. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a  local Chinese forward in the national team.

In fact, the Singapore Chinese striker has been such a rarity in the past 30 years that you can practically count them with  one hand.

That’s not all - the legendary Quah Kim Song aside, the rest were mainly bit players in the national set-up.

They included

- Wong Kok Choy (my favourite player from Singapore’s 1980 Pre-Olympic qualifying campaign adventure who strangely disappeared from the scene after that )

- Michael Tan (who played just a couple of Malaysia Cup matches in the early 80s before disappearing from the scene),

- Tay Peng Kee (who was usually used as a substitute during his stint with the Lions in the late 80s. Nevertheless, he still managed to score a handful of goals)

-  Toh Choon Ming (a prolific striker in the S-League for Gombak United and Jurong in the late 90s, but who would either disappoint in the few national team matches he played in or drop out of the squad, citing work commitments each time).

What about Steven Tan? Well, the fact that the ex-Tanjong Pagar United and Tampines Rovers winger was often called Super-Sub during the Malaysia Cup days shows that even he had difficulties commanding a place in the first eleven.

So I’m really looking forward to seeing Quak and Luo in action for the Lions one day. Here’s hoping that they will grab with both hands the precious opportunity that has been given to them and make full use of it.

I’m also hoping that Luo will turn out to be a decent and fairly regular goal-scorer. That is a sure-fire way of not only capturing the public’s imagination but of inspiring other young aspiring Chinese footballers.

As I wrote in one of my first few posts nine months ago, Quah was such an inspiration that kids were proudly wearing Quah Kim Song t-shirts which were bought from the market.

Back then, even my Teochew-speaking nanny, who had no formal education, knew who Kim Song was. And she would proudly say each time on the eve of a Malaysia Cup game: “As long as Kim Song is playing, Singapore will win.”

I’m not sure if we can ever say the same of Luo. After all, he would have already been noticed and featured in the papers a long time ago if he is such a prodiguous talent.

I would be more than happy if he emerges as a reliable forward. That would be good enough for this long-suffering Lions fan, thank you very much.

Yours in sport

Singapore Sports Fan

Related links:

27 May 2008 – Go for it Jasper (but alas, you are no Kim Song)