The game of musical chairs continued while the little boys kept squabbling not listening to the sport’s world governing body and had their final swansong:
It came from the horse’s mouth, critics might say the goal keeper’s jaws, that Sri Lanka has been pampered and mollycoddled with big money by way of international funding in football.
The whole country has now woken up to the fact that some kind of a beggars’ opera was taking place for more than two decades and hence the hysterical clamouring to enter the sport’s administration that has now been banned by the sport’s world governing body FIFA and become an international pariah.
Beleaguered former Sri Lanka football president Jaswar Umar, the last heavyweight before the knockout blow, held back nothing at a Press conference this week when he revealed the kind of FIFA funding in billions received throughout the years that has raised more questions among the lay community than it did before the ban.
The think-tanks knew the writing was on the wall with politicking and bureaucracy taking centre stage despite a warning shot fired by the world governing body eight years ago.
Why Jaswar chose to project the amount of money Sri Lanka Football will be losing in the aftermath of the FIFA world ban and not talk about the sport played on the field where the country plummeted in the ranks from a purported 116 to the present 207 from 211 countries, is anybody’s guess.
Perhaps Jaswar will have less to answer the football followers in the country why the Expenditure sheet was not made public been in high office for a year while his predecessors made grandiose noises and held sway with little or no public accountability for more than 20 years.
What the colourfual bandwagon did was project themselves as messiahs to get in and grab the hot seats as the sport and country ended in cold storage, one before the last on the world stage.
Independent critics and common folks alike have now being given enough ammunition to throw at the so-called keepers of football in the country whose team standard could not fall any further below than its current world ranking with no visible signs of positiveness to be seen and only endorsed by the fact that Jaswar and his team had to put out a whole new manifesto ahead of their election in 2021 to take the country’s football out of the dumps.
But Jaswar in his quest to wipe the slate clean could not even hold back some highly disputed utterances by complaining that Sri Lanka would go back 20 years given the current mess and the subsequent ban. With Sri Lanka ranked 207 it leaves the ordinary layman wondering to what depths can the country end up than it is already in and Jaswar’s utterances could make him the perfect Sri Lankan politician who now wants even his opponents to rally around him after claiming to be the Formula for all ills and then and worse pointing fingers at a Mafia whose members he cannot name. A typical Sri Lankan side-step of passing the buck!
While football officials have none on their side, to the common layman or average football follower in the country, the battle between football administrators and the Sports Ministry that paved the way for the global ban means nothing.
To them the question is what happened to the billions that were poured into the coffers and why did Sri Lanka’s football standard go from bad to worse. They could breathe a sigh of relief now that the funding has ceased. Unlike cricket, most Sri Lankan football followers will continue to follow the exploits of Brazil, Germany and Argentina with their own country unable to give them the pride and satisfaction they long for.
How many domestic football teams were moulded and their players groomed for international competition because of FIFA funding and how much of infrastructure development was done as the money poured in. How much of grass-root level development was done, how much was done to pick the right players that could make a competitive team and did any administrator do anything worthwhile to shelve the dirty game of politics that has invaded every sphere of life in the country.
Sri Lanka is a breezy country and the answers will continue to blow in the wind.