Joecities

Went to watch the Commonwealth Games badminton the other day. I yelled my lungs out supporting the Singapore Shuttlers, especially when the unseeded mixed doubles team of Widjaja and Liu narrowly edged out the 4th seeded English team of Kellogg and Clark.
I was going to write a short spiel on mixed feelings regarding Singapore's key players being mostly 'foreign imports' (half the team was indonesian, the other half was chinese). But it would sound weird coming from me. After all, I'm in Australia - contributing to the economy, GDP, taxes, etc. but I'm still undeniably Singaporean.

But the feelings that were stirred up watching Singapore Colours fighting a hard fight transcended the origins of the players wearing those colours. I think the last time I cheered so loudly was back in the old Malaysian Cup / Abbas & Alistair days.

I guess the 'gahmen' plan is get these players to Singapore, then with some luck, they'll hang around and spawn super-sportsoffspring who will be full-fledged Singaporean. After all, with only 4 mil people and 99% of them focused on career and family, how many people would take the risk of a sporting career ? Alternatively, they could just give up and start a counting-money olympics or invent some other sport that we'd be good at (OVernight mahjong ? Queueing ? PAP Voting ?)

Actually, if you think about it. Singapore was made up of chinese (from china), and malays (from malaysia/indonesia), so chances are we share the same ancestors as these sporty-chinese and indonesians. These new migrants just decided to come later.

In the meantime, I'm keeping a close eye on the badminton and hoping that they make it to the finals so I can try get some tickets off ebay or something and scream myself hoarse. Again.