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In your opinion, what area in SRAM should be
improvised for Malaysia to dominate the squash world at the senior
level?
YAM Tunku : Well, I really believe that we should try and bring
more foreign players here. It may not be necessary for a whole year,
but if they can devote a whole season, like 3 or 4 months to play our
leagues with all our national players, there will be very competitive
squash going on. That’s something that could be started. I think there
just have to be more leagues going on around the country. Every state
should really have a well-developed league, at both the senior and
junior levels. The current program of sending our players overseas
should continue, but at a younger age. I believe that one of the
successes of Ong Beng Hee and Nicol David, was that every year from
the age of nine to ten, they spent for instance, Christmas in Scotland
for the Scottish Junior Open, and then down to England for the British
Junior Open. We do that for them, but we ourselves should have a
similar junior program where foreigners can come here to play against
our players regularly. I would like to see, over time the format of
junior tournaments and also some of the other tournaments, change. At
the moment, squash seems to be stuck on a knock out basis. Once you’re
out in the early rounds, you don’t play again. What I’d like to see is
that during the four or five days of tournament, everyone gets four or
five games, whether they lose or not. They go to another level like
the classic plates, where they play their own peers, or the same guys
that lost in the same rounds. In a league format, groups of four play
each other on a round robin, and the top four progresses to play the
semifinals, and the next group playing off other group matches,
another round robin series continues. I think you get more matches
then. A player really improves not so much in training, where you
definitely improve your skills and fitness but you don’t necessarily
improve on the mental side. That, you’ll only improve when you’re on
court, when you’re at 9-9 in the fifth game, and you’re very, very
tired. Then the mental side, the will to win comes through and you
continue to think about the game. Squash is a thinking game. At the
end of the day, those super fit players, who can retrieve every shot
don’t necessarily win the match because they’re weak on shot
selection, the hot craft…the tactics. You have to employ different
tactics when you play different style of players. So, that mental side
has got to come through, they’ve got to be thinking about their tactic
and strategy…every stroke, every point, every game. Sometimes, they
have to change tactic and strategy two to three times, half way
through a game. So, I think the good squash players are actually the
one that continues to think about their game.
Squash is
considered as one of the top sport in the country, but it lacks
electronic media coverage. This aspect not only applies regionally,
but also globally. What endeavors could be implemented to get squash
events broadcasted on television regularly like soccer, badminton or
tenpin bowling in Malaysia?
YAM Tunku : Well, I think there has to be a commitment from the
channels, the owners of the electronic media. I think this is a sports
problem. We don’t see enough Malaysian sports on television. We have
very little coverage of sports, particularly local sport. We have a
lot of coverage of international sport, particularly international
football, but not enough of the other sports. So, I think it’s
important that the owners of electronic media start producing local
squash for the local market. Obviously there’s an economic liability
here, but I think squash is ideal for a program, which is not
necessarily live. For instance, during a tournament, if you have a
daily half an hour program to cover all the good matches of the day,
with proper editing, it will make interesting television by capturing
the best parts of a match, with the commenter really setting the scene
of what happened earlier, and then maybe have the last 15 minutes, or
important part of the game. Where else if you have to watch a whole
match live, maybe those flat periods during a squash match, the
television viewer might not enjoy that. So, you can have edited
version. I think that would make it interesting.
Despite squash being played in more than 100
countries in the world, it has yet to become a sport in the Olympics.
What is the possibility of squash to be included in the Olympics?
YAM Tunku : Well, I visited the International Olympic Council
(IOC) recently and had a meeting with Jack Rock, the new president of
the IOC. He said that in the last program review, squash actually came
third of all the sports that were vying to get into the Olympics,
after golf and rugby 7s. They have to drop other sports in the program
first before taking another sport because Olympics have said, only 28
sports and 301 events, medals. That’s it for the Olympics, 10,500 of
players and officials. Now, in squash, we can get it down easy on the
numbers, because we don’t have hundreds and hundreds of athletes in a
32 draw or any other format like I’ve said. It could be a good way
forward but we still need to have a fall out off the Olympics, and
dropped by the IOC. Of course the politics of that is very, very keen
because even sports like baseball, they don’t want to be dropped.
SRAM has one of the most active and updated
sports websites in the country. However, we do face difficulties in
securing advertisers. Can OCM assist in this?
YAM Tunku
: Well, of course we can introduce
you to our own supporters of sports, but I think the important thing
is for SRAM to do their own marketing. I think SRAM knows which
products or companies support squash. OCM doesn’t know that, and I
think the way to start is to get your existing sponsors on board, even
at the lowest level of financial commitment. Show them what the web
site can be built up over time, and maybe over a number of years, you
can then start charging more and get new advertisers in. You have to
show them that you have enough hits, enough eyeballs first. So, you
really got to build up that program. If you have a lot of competitions
and even school level results, and all of that is on your web site,
that’s the way forward. More people would visit your web site because
they want to know what happened last weekend in a match at their
school, their team…they want to know in the individuals how their
friends, their son or their nephew faired in a competition. So, I
think it’s the competitions and those sort of thing that has to
increase before advertisers will come in. |
