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Too many cooks spoil the chutney in hockey confederation
HARESH DEOL
Too many cooks spoil the chutney in hockey confederation
HARESH DEOL
Twelve vice presidents to sit in the Malaysian Hockey Confederation (MHC)?
Add the president, deputy-president, four independent members, secretary-general, assistant secretary-general, treasurer and assistant treasurer and you now have a full team of 22 to compete in the ongoing Malaysia Hockey League (MHL).
In fact, they could field two teams and compete with each other!
Baffling as this may sound, the Federation of International Hockey (FIH) has one president, one general-secretary, one chief executive officer and 14 members — five of which represent the Continental Federations and one that serves as the athletes' representative. That's 17 officials for a world body.
The fiasco brewing in MHC is no better than the Bollywood dramas on Zee TV.
The MHC extraordinary general meeting is scheduled on Saturday. The agenda of the meeting, as stated in a letter dated Sept 22 to the delegates, is to approve and adopt the amendments of the constitution.
Articles 8.2.2 and 8.2.3 of the earlier constitution stated MHC will have one deputy president and four vice presidents respectively. The new constitution reads there will be one deputy president, two senior vice presidents and 10 vice presidents per Article 10.
But that's where the drama begins.
The MHC was formed on July 16, 2005. It was in line with FIH's requirement to merge the men's and women's federations at the national level under one umbrella.
Only 10 representatives from each body (men's and women's) were invited to MHC then.
But the Malaysian Hockey Federation (MHF) has 16 affiliates while the Malaysian Women's Hockey Association has 11 members.
Some states have separate associations representing each gender while KL has a single body governing both sexes.
But why didn't MHC work towards merging all state bodies since 2005? Wouldn't that have solved half if not most of the grouses?
Is it true that MHC's annual general meetings have only been attended by a selected few and not by all the representatives?
And now the drama escalates.
If MHC had sorted out this mess earlier, they would realise there is no hockey association in Perlis.
The Sports Commissioner's Office confirmed there is no "Perlis HA" while the Perlis Women's Hockey Association was dissolved in 2004.
MHF is well aware of this as they had, in a meeting last year, restricted Perlis' participation to age-group tournaments only.
So can someone explain why Perlis HA was acknowledged by UniMap's vice chancellor Brig. Jen Datuk Prof Dr Kamarudin Hussin in his closing ceremony speech of the UniMAP Vice Chancellor Trophy Invitational tournament on May 25 last year, and how UniMAP are allowed to play in the ongoing MHL? Isn't UniMAP an affiliate of a non-existing HA?
It is mind boggling to see the need to rush the MHC constitution when FIH extended the due date to December. Perhaps MHC could learn from its counterparts in the FA of Malaysia who went through the same process and incorporated the women's department into the national body in 2006.
MHC had all the time in the world to get it right. Yet, they failed to do so.
Now they are eager to have 22 people running the show — with no guarantee any one of them could play it right.
Could this be a case of too many cooks spoil the chutney?
