Prismatic said:
I would highly recommend you to take a reality check. We are in the early part of the TWENTY-FIRST century now. Money is everything now. Just look at how much they are paying the players???
Yes. The portion that I did not include in is the shift for sports to be money driven. Athletes with appearance fees etc. There is an apparent transition from altruistic aims (to win for the country) to financial aims. This is also covered in the course I went through.
akane, I have to agree with you regarding local politicians and sports. But there has been at least two major moves made in the recent years:
1. The Ministry of Community Development has been renamed the Ministry of Community Development and Sports
2. The Singapore Sports School, which was started partly because of recommendations to PM Goh by a report submitted to him by COSS (Committee on Sporting Singapore).
I have once taken part in a footrace at least 5 years back, where the GOH flagging us off was a Minister (which one, don't ask me, I would rather be more concerned with my race), who came decked out to start a footrace wearing golfing attire. Just can't recall if it was long pants or golf shorts he wore, but flagging off in a totally unrelated attire? At least the Sheares Bridge Run was flagged off by the COA/COD in running gear. Now that shows a fair deal about how involved a person is in the event.
By the way, if you followed the papers, FAS only got to know of the fixtures way after the SRU booked the stadium from SSC. So guess who gets the priority? SRU came first, and claims that they cannot allow the match to be played while they go elsewhere, because they're also expecting an international crowd of rugby supporters anyway. Dilemma - SG/JP match, we get Japanese soccer fans. Rugby - we get local and many other foreign supporters. What would you do if you were the person responsible for making the decision of who to loan the stadium to, in SSC? Personally I would stick to the current arrangement of rugby in the National Stadium, and the soccer match in Jalan Besar.
XXX_Boy, you may want to read the earlier part of my post. Acknowledged that times have changed, but if you are only interested solely in betting, are you really contributing to soccer?