Happy Birthday, Singapore.

By Les Tan/Red Sports

Red Sports was set up to tell the Singapore sports story. It is a story worth telling because we are a young nation and searching for an identity.

Sports helps us in that search, providing an echo chamber to reinforce who we are, and where we come from.

Our school gives us the first sense of identity beyond family, and when the school team wins, we feel pride. Years after graduating, we happily, even longingly, identify ourselves as an old girl or an old boy. We may even wish we were back in school.

Singapore is a multi-ethnic island and sports is one of the precious few common languages we share. Only sport can bring together a heaving mass of 50,000 at the National Stadium for a crucial football game. Few (non-compulsory) events can match that.

But the question “Who are we?” is still not so easily answered.

Chinese-Singaporean? Indian-Singaporean? Malay-Singaporean? Eurasian-Singaporean?

Just Singaporean?

We will never become colour-blind to race, and so the rare photo above of ethnic Indian and Malay boys playing the traditionally Chinese-dominated sport of basketball stands out.

“Who is that Malay boy playing in that basketball team?” is the question probably asked every time Alfilial plays for Singapore Polytechnic.

When Eugene Luo made it to the Young Lions this year, I was asked, “Who is that Chinese boy playing for the Young Lions?” because it is rare for a Chinese to play football at the national level.

While school sports provide our youth with a sense of identity and belonging, there is a drought at the national level because no national sports team plays frequently and visibly enough for Singaporeans to rally around.

The national football team, the one team that can summon the masses into the National Stadium, doesn’t play meaningful matches often enough. The last time Singapore played a game many wanted to watch was the semi-final against Vietnam in the ASEAN Football Championship in December 2008. 48,000 showed up to witness the heartbreaking 0-1 loss.

You cannot support what you cannot see.

And so while we may have the sports infrastructure and can organise games to impress the international crowd, what we want more than anything else is to see the national team of any sport play meaningful games on a regular basis in Singapore, regionally and internationally.

That’s our wish this National Day.

Happy Birthday, Singapore.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ7i-Ydlapg