THE stupendous volley by France talisman Kylian Mbappe which dragged the FIFA World Cup final into extra-time on Sunday was initiated by two players who once came under Saad Ichalalene’s tutelage.

BEFORE hiring French coaches became fashionable following Les Bleus’ maiden World Cup victory in their own backyard in 1998, the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) were probably two steps ahead than the rest of the world.

PRIME Minister Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s stint as the nation’s 15th Youth and Sports Minister from March 2008 to April 2009 was too brief for him to be able to create a strong legacy.

IT WAS in September 2010 that I received an e-mail from Thierry Marchand, the head of international football at authoritative weekly magazine France Football, inviting me to be a member of a newly-assembled international jury for football’s most prestigious award, Ballon d’Or, which means the Golden Ball in French.

CONGRATULATIONS are in order for the national football Under-16 side for having earned a ticket to the AFC Asian Cup Under-17 tournament next year after a successful qualifying campaign in Indonesia.

THE tragic stampede in Malang, Indonesia, brought back mixed memories for me personally to the day when a small group of sports journalists survived a harrowing incident in Hong Kong.

KARL Gunter Lange, a track and field specialist from Germany, issued a warning to the Malaysian powers-that-be almost 30 years ago on the dangers of early burnout for budding athletes in athletics.

CHIEF coach A. Arulselvaraj in on the brink of joining a select few individuals who had brought the nation to the men’s hockey World Cup.

THE choice of Kim Pan-gon to be the national football team supremo has been seen as a masterstroke by FA of Malaysia (FAM) president Datuk Hamidin Mohd Amin.

50 years on, coach still the only one to have led football team to Olympics.