KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 20 — Former national Under-22 football squad head coach Datuk Ong Kim Swee is set to return to the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) as the head of the FAM Youth Development Unit.
This was confirmed by Kim Swee, who agreed to the appointment after FAM decided not to extend his contract as the U-22 head coach which expired last December.
According to Kim Swee, he will begin his year-long contract this month.
“Of course my job is to focus on the development of football in our country. I hope that my involvement in this unit will help us a little bit in terms of our youth development.
"At the development stage, we need to know that it will take time, and I will not be here forever, but the development of players will come for a very long time," he told reporters after the post-mortem session of the 2019 SEA Games involving football, at the National Sports Council (MSN) here, today.
Kim Swee said he would be cooperating with those from the National Football Development Programme (NFDP) and the Mokhtar Dahari Football Academy (AMD) to develop several grassroots development programmes.
“I will be working with Saad (Ichalalene) to formulate programmes based on the roadmap of FAM, AFC (Asian Football Confederation) and Fifa. Every youth development programme needs a long period (to bear fruit),” he added.
Kim Swee, who guided Malaysia to gold medal at the 2011 SEA Games in Indonesia, saw his contract ended following Malaysia’s poor performance at the 2019 Games in the Philippines.
The 49-year-old coach, however, refused to pin the blame on any party for the team’s failure, and instead proposed two plans to ensure that the Malaysian squad return to the biennial Games with renewed vigour.
“This post-mortem session was not for finger-pointing. What happened at the SEA Games has been explained before, so I do not want to touch on the cause of failure discussed in there,” he said. — Bernama
