The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion
The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion |
| Posted: 05 Dec 2011 03:47 PM PST DEC 6 — Last Friday's draw for the Uefa European Championship finals next year turned up some exciting match-ups as expected. Unlike the Fifa World Cup, all 16 teams have something to offer here, the qualifying stage ensured that. Let me start this series of previews with a look at the prospects for Group A, comprising co-host Poland, Greece, Russia and the Czech Republic. The Poles will not be pushovers as apart from hosting they do seem to have quality. Arsenal goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny looks to be gaining in stature as a world-class player and will be difficult to beat. The next two noteworthy players —- both representing Borussia Dortmund in the Bundesliga — are midfielder Jakub Blaszczykowski and striker Robert Lewandowski. The brains behind the outfit, skipper Blaszczykowski can hold things together in midfield while scheming out the gameplan for his teammates. Lewandowski is expected to be the star man though, getting the goals for the Poles, which are a team that will be well organised and disciplined in their approach. This should also apply for the rest of the teams in Group A too, of course. Speaking of which, Greece mastered the well organised and disciplined, albeit defensively tight, tactic on their way to winning Euro2004. It truly seems like a long time ago. The question now remains if the Greeks will go with experience or a mix and match in Euro2012. Experience comes with Angelos Charisteas, 31, (playing in the Greece Super League with Panaitolikos) and 34-year-old Giorgios Karagounis (Panathinaikos), while youth comes in the shape of defender Kyriakos Papadopolous, 19, who stars for Schalke 04 in Germany. Oh, by the way, nothing new is expected from the Greeks in terms of tactics — defend deep and rely on breakaways. The Czech Republic are another team that relies on tactical discipline. I am looking forward to seeing Tomas Necid (CSKA Moscow) and Tomas Peckhart (FC Nurnberg), two young strikers being given a chance together although expect most teams in this group to play with only one man upfront. Another Tomas, that is Rosicky, plays for Arsenal and is the long-time national captain. He may have had a bad spell for his club in recent years but may just be peaking at the right time, considering his noticeable improvement in performance for the Gunners this season. The biggest of the former Iron Curtain members in this group, Russia, has a lot to make up for following their absence in the Fifa World Cup 2010 in South Africa. Dutchman Dick Advocaat succeeded where his countryman Guus Hiddink failed. Their defence looks pondering with three of CSKA Moscow's experienced backline — Sergei Ignashevich and the Berezutsky twins, Vasili and Aleksei — still in the reckoning while Yuri Zhirkov (of Anzhi Makhachkala, the club which made Samuel Eto'o the highest-paid player in the world) still plunders the left flank. Then, there is the enigma that is Andrei Arshavin (Arsenal), who will be key for Advocaat. As captain, much will be expected of him but he seems to be lacking time on the pitch, and has a lot to prove for his club and country by next summer. Somehow, despite their past pedigree in Europe (four-time finalists in the first eight championships), I don't see them going further than the last 16, if they get out of this group at all. The Russians are past their best, especially since, like Arshavin, strikers Roman Pavlyuckenko (Tottenham Hotspur) and Pavel Pogrebnyak (Vfb Stuttgart) are not getting regular games at their respective clubs too. Incidentally, Greece are not the only ex-champions in Group A. The Russians won the first ever European title in 1960 while the Czechs did it in 1976. The latter also have been in every championship since 1996 under their new guise of the Czech Republic (after shedding off the Slovakian part). OK, let's be frank, this group certainly looks like a snooze fest as there is too much similarity in the teams' qualities and tactical approach. * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| There are no angels here, only incentives Posted: 05 Dec 2011 03:39 PM PST DEC 6 — As Malaysians conduct their post-mortem of the recently-concluded Umno annual general assembly, allow me to draw your attention to the government scholars — a total of 28,291 of them in 37 countries as of 2010, according to the Higher Education Department. A fraction of them will be graduating this coming summer and most likely a subset of the graduating scholars are actively applying for jobs as we speak — at home and abroad. It'll only be time before the question of "What happened to our scholars?" saturates our national discourse again. It's a re-enactment of a play we know so well, just that with the formation of TalentCorp and the recent World Bank reports, the issue has become more salient in people's minds. I'm not a JPA scholar but I come in contact with many. Maybe it's just me, but there are two questions that I no longer feel comfortable asking my immediate peers who are on scholarship: "How's overseas job applications coming up?" and "Are you excited to go home?" Once innocuous questions like these may now come across as being extremely provocative. It indirectly insinuates: "What on earth are you doing signing employment contracts with firms abroad when you know you have a bond to serve?" Most of the time, I just choose not to talk about it. If this is an exact repetition of previous years, the public will brand my peers who are allowed to get off scot free with monikers ranging from "ungrateful people" to "unpatriotic thieves." So I write this article to answer this question: "Why do my peers do the things they do?" In their defence, I think there is a lack of recognition of the dilemma that they undergo. As much as I concede that there are bad apples out there that will gladly free ride the system, most of the JPA scholars I meet are not the sort people you will paint as "ungrateful" or "unpatriotic." It all boils down to incentives. The fact is a majority of them do not believe that JPA or TalentCorp will get around to bonding them back — at least not yet. This means the absence of a secured job as implied by their contracts, leaving them to fend for themselves. Therefore applying for jobs abroad acts as an insurance policy. If they are bonded, then they will break the contract with their foreign employer and go back. If they are not, they have nothing to lose but everything to gain. There is hardly any downside. The bottom line is this: with the absence of any credible sanctions, the scholars are better off if they engage in active recruiting overseas. But this doesn't imply that all is nice and dandy either. The thing that really baffles me is that the incentives are rigged from the very start. I personally know scholars who have turned down other scholarships from BNM and Petronas for JPA because they are utterly convinced that it'll be a free ride. It's a gamble that they think they can win. And when TalentCorp swoops in with the Scholarship Talent Attraction and Retention (STAR) programme, they are the ones who moan the most about how inefficient our government is and that the six-year bond is the worst thing that has ever happened to them. It's really infuriating as it's a huge display of logical inconsistency. What do they want exactly? If indeed our government is as efficient as they desire, they can pretty much kiss their free education goodbye. They will clutch at any straw to justify why they shouldn't return. Well, gambling only hurts when you lose. Then where does altruism/moral obligation come in? Well, they are good bedtime stories but make terrible public policy. If everyone has halos, they will all pay back the cost of their education even if they are allowed to get off scot free. But nobody is that dumb and we shouldn't count on it. Talent Corporation and JPA We often assume that the incentives between TalentCorp and JPA are aligned. I believe this merits more discussion and I argue that TalentCorp has got its chances of success stacked against it from the start. And here's why: If there's one thing that I've learnt from my internship with the City of Chicago is that horizontal organisational conflicts or turf wars exist in all governments. Whenever a new agency is superimposed into the organisational chart, the prior bureaucracy will most likely resist it. Prior to the formation of TalentCorp, JPA was the sole agency responsible for the ownership and the operation of the scholars. Now it has to share it with a newly-formed agency. Anybody who has worked in government can tell you that no bureaucracy likes losing its turf. For all I know I could be wrong and I would certainly give these agencies the benefit of the doubt. But if conventional wisdom applies, I would argue that this is indeed TalentCorp's biggest challenge. I know two things: 1) The STAR programme was implemented for the Class of 2011. 2) Not all of the graduates from Class of 2011 were subjected to that programme. In fact, some of them didn't even know about it. And as long as the scholars continue to see their peers getting off scot free, nobody will take TalentCorp seriously. How could this be possible? The most plausible explanations that I can think of are: 1) TalentCorp did not receive the complete list of graduates from JPA, 2) JPA doesn't have the complete list of graduating scholars or 3) Both. Option 2 and 3 are just downright scary. If I'm right, then the crux of this problem is this: Is TalentCorp a permanent fixture in the Malaysian scene and will it cease to exist in the event that the current prime minister goes? The reason why bureaucracies are so resilient is that they know they don't have to outwit anybody. They merely have to outlast them. And if this dynamic is indeed true, then the whole cycle of unaligned incentives from the organizations down to the scholars will continue to persist. I'll end this by saying: taunts like "ungrateful" and "unpatriotic" miss the point. People and organisations react to the incentives that they face and they will conduct themselves in such a way that maximises their long-term interests. In fact, that's what WE ALL do. We have been down this road before and some of us think that there's a clear culprit to blame. Things are often more complicated than meets the eye. There are no angels here. Only incentives. * Ang Jian Wei is a final-year economics major at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. He blogs atlowfatketupat.wordpress.com. * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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