COMMENT by Jugjet SinghGERMAN Paul Lissek is back in Malaysia after a brief stint with the Australian World Cup winning team, and the National Sports Council (NSC) has entrusted him to scout for under-14 talent across the nation.
Development was his strongest point when he was in Germany before becoming Malaysian coach for the 1998 Commonwealth Games, and he has come a full circle after a decade.
And there is more development news for hockey en thusiasts, as the Malaysian Hockey Federation (MHF) will embark on a nation-wide ‘Satu Mas’ programme, also aimed at the under-14 group.
Both the programmes, by the MHF and NSC, will not clash but compliment each other and start this month.
Lissek will conduct coaching clinics at Smart Schools, and identify talent, while the Satu Mas programme will see each state concentrating on 20 of their best for one year.
The budget for the Satu Mas programme is RM2 million a year, and it is projected to continue for at least five years.
The idea is simple, states select their coaches, who will pick the best 20 under-14 players and train them for one year, and receive RM10,000 per-month for the exercise.
With 14 states under the programme, 280 youth will benefit from the plan and in five years, Malaysia will have 1,400 hockey players from the ages of 14-19.
Doing the match is simpler than making it into a reality, but first, the MHF council needs to be commended for coming up with a plan.
But it will remain a plan, like so many before it, if the states do not make full use of this opportunity, as they only have to provide the coaches and players, while money will not be their problem, as the government has approved a budget for it.
The MHF, in reality, has been forced to conduct their own development work, as schools have not been supportive of hockey in the last five years, and only die-hard supporters like Anderson of Ipoh, Tengku Besar Secondary School of Negri Sembilan, Malacca High School, Setapak High School and a smattering of others have been consistently prodding their students to take up the sport.
Coming back to Lissek, the German was supposed to head for Pakistan after the World Cup, but changed his mind over security reasons.
He is no stranger to Malaysia, and Malaysians know him well.
All this while he held the wrong post, and finally after a decade of experimenting with him, the NSC realised that he is, at best, a development coach and should be left in that capacity.
The council meeting on Sunday endorsed Lissek and the Satu Mas programme, now lets see if it will produce the desired result in five years time.
