Off the Cuff - Silver, yet again

LEST we are over exuberant about our badminton mixed doubles pair winning the silver medal in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday, it's timely to get our perspective right.
First, Malaysia bagged its first Olympic silver medal 20 years ago in Atlanta through our men's doubles duo of Cheah Soon Kit and Yap Kim Hock. Four years earlier, Sidek brothers Razif and Jalani won bronze in Barcelona, our first ever Olympic medal.
Inexplicably Malaysian badminton players can conquer strong opponents from China, South Korea, Japan, Denmark, and newly emerging powers in the game like India and Thailand but not Indonesia.
Chan Peng Soon and Goh Liu Ying had that "once in a lifetime" chance to grab Malaysia's first ever Olympic gold after making it into the final by stunning even higher ranking pairs; but like Soon Kit and Kim Hock in the 1996 Olympics, they buckled under what I would call the "Indonesian phobia".
By the same token, Indonesian shuttlers are psychologically driven by the battle-cry that it would be unthinkable for them to lose to their Malaysian opponents.
Indonesian-Malaysian rivalry in badminton goes back a long way and it's always intense.
When facing their rivals from this neighbour, our players have not been able to shrug off, for lack of a better description, their " Big Brother" phobia.
Whether it's against Rudy Hartono, Liem Swie King, Icuk Sugiarto and Taufik Hidayat over the years, the outcome is almost always the same.
The classic example of this phobia took place in the 1982 Alba World Cup championships men's single final at Stadium Negara in Kuala Lumpur.
Misbun Sidek was leading 9-1 against Swie King in the rubber set but to the disappointment of the entire nation watching it live on television, he lost the match.
"It was crazy. I never expected to win, especially after trailing 1-9 in the 'rubber' but somehow, the points kept coming my way," was how Swie King summed it all up that night.
Of late, however, Indonesia curiously enough has not been able to produce world beaters in the singles but its mixed doubles pair of Tontowi Ahmad and Liliyana
Natsir had an unexpectedly easy win over Peng Soon and Liu Ying.
I say unexpectedly because all of us were thinking and hoping that they would put up a much better fight than that and certainly not buckle easily under the pressure. The Indonesian pair's gameplan was attack while ours was more defensive. Our pair were lobbing too many shots to the baseline thus allowing their opponents to whack their way through.
We congratulate them for winning the silver but looking at the game from a critical angle, Peng Soon let us down big time, gold medal wise.
Liu Ying was formidable and I could sense her frustration when her partner's service, for example, wasn't good enough for such a critical match.
How I wished Morten Frost Hansen, the Badminton Association of Malaysia technical director, had taken over as sideline coach that night to drum in critical tips for Peng Soon and Liu Ying.
The winning mentality when it matters most once again deserted us on what I called in this column two weeks ago at the start of the Rio Olympics, our "It's now or never" chance for Malaysia's first Olympic gold medal.
We do have, however, another shot at that elusive medal when Tan Wee Kiong and Goh V Shem take on China's Fu Haifeng and Zhang Nan for the men's doubles gold.
For the record, the Malaysians had beaten the Chinese pair in the preliminary rounds but certainly in a gold medal match, it's a different shuttle game altogether, knowing China's winning mentality.
At the time of writing this, Datuk Lee Chong Wei's semi-final match against his nemesis the "Great Wall" Lin Dan has not taken place but like I said in my previous column, my money is on Lin Dan based on sheer statistics alone.
All said and done, it's been our best ever Olympic medal haul with two silver medals in the bag at the time of writing but as I mentioned earlier for us to improve, let's get our perspective right.
Unlike other sports, only a handful of nations are of world ranking in badminton and Malaysia has for a very, very long time been one of them.
It's already long overdue for the country to have won a badminton Olympic gold medal but if we are over-jubilant at even winning a silver, then our dream of winning the first gold would remain just that, a dream.
An ex-colleague from Bernama, Datuk Yong Soo Heong, sent me this text as I was about to finish this column early yesterday: "Out of the RM600,000 that the Malaysian mixed doubles pair will be getting, I hope they will get themselves a Tag Heuer watch each to remind themselves because the tagline of these watches is "DON'T CRACK UNDER PRESSURE", especially for Peng Soon.
For our men's doubles pair as well.
Well said, Yong.
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