We were shite. That's all it was, a shite job by a group of players you could only pity the same way you pity a peg-legged bum in the street: cold head-shaking, with the knowledge that they couldn't do anything more, that despite all your pontificating, ranting, even token coin-dropping, you couldn't change things, and no one ever could. Malaysian football is in a sad, sad state, and tonight summed up everything about us in an inglorious rotten nutshell.

We were great once. So were many countries, they had great players too. France had Fontaine, Papin and Platini. Did they roll over and die? No, they put in a system designed to utilise a positive progressive mindset and groom superstar players from grassroots level, blooding and breeding players like Zidane, Henry, Makelele and Vieira. Uruguay had Franscescoli, today they have Recoba. Argentina had Kempes, Maradona, Passarella; today they have Tevez, Messi and Mascherano. England had Moore, Hurst and Greaves, and today Rooney and Neville grace the scene. Even Northern Ireland, who once had the likes of Best in their ranks, have produced at least one decent player in David Healy. Have Malaysia moved on up from the days of Mokhtar? No. Of course not. We've moved down, endlessly spiralling into oblivion, shoulder-rubbing with Kyrgyzstan, Bahamas and Seychelles in the FIFA rankings while the likes of Equatorial Guinea, Azerbaijan and Mauritania have climbed above us. Even that little self-ingratiating pimple on our sorry sore rear end, Singapore, has risen to 131st in the world, a full 19 places.

We used to trash Singapore, now we revel in even getting away with a 1-1 draw at home. We enjoy home advantage in a tournament we have no decent right competing in and got hammered in our own citadel [more like Barbie's Pony Castle] 5-1 by a Chinese team featuring three Premier League scholars and various European-based upstarts [our definition of 'internationally experienced' is two guys in a German second division team and a crocked striker who couldn't get a reserve game for Strasbourg]. Coach and players alike talked big about causing an upset, and had two goals scored against them by a guy named Wang [talk about getting your first-class dicking]. We were outplayed so comprehensively the Chinese coach could afford a sarcastic backhand by suggesting his team lost discipline in allowing us to score our one goal.

Don't blame the players, blame a poorly-run, defeatist system, for two decades administered by self-obsessed fanboys who couldn't amble up a gentle incline, let alone run a football association. Relatively speaking the players aren't all that bad, some're almost half-decent. None of them however are competitive material. If China's players were stainless steel, Malaysian players would be wooden boards, part single-ply matchwood, part amalgamated sawdust.

We speak of the glory days of Mokhtar Dahari, Santokh Singh, Soh Chin Aun and R. Arumugam, and long for the time when names of such stature would ever rise again. As a member of the current football-watching generation, I can only advise this: stop hoping. Malaysia's football is a shambles, a hopeless wreck cast away into an eternity of false hopes and languid periods of cynicism and fatalistic underachievement. The current management would do no better than to take us to the very bottom, at least with the knowledge that from then on the only way left to go is up, if even that'd ever eventuate. Bring on Guam, Cambodia [can we play you every week?] and American Samoa. Malaysia officially did worse than a team of literally nobody [who lost 1-0 against Chile in 1973], the national football team sucks, big time, no one is available to stop the rot, and frankly no one cares. Forget the spirit of Supermokh, he's forgotten us long ago, up in Heaven, bless his soul, playing kickabout with people worthy of being called true footballers.