KU LI : BN HAS DESTROYED MALAYSIA'S FUTURES

Subhanallah....



Ku Li layak bercakap mengenai perkara ini sebab beliau merupakan pengasas & president pertama Petronas. Tapi sayang, nak lead caucus kena kacau pulak dengan Wak Sembab Muhyidin. Terpaksa pulak guna platform lain.



Komen saya, apa nak jadi dengan masa depan anak - anak kita?



Free Malaysia Today

Sat, Dec 12, 2009
National


KUALA LUMPUR: Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah (picture) today painted a bleak future for Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional government, saying it had squandered the nation’s oil wealth to the tune of billions of ringgit.


The former Finance Minister said Petronas’s oil profits had been used “to bail out failing companies, buy arms, build grandiose cities amidst cleared palm oil estates.”


“Instead of helping eradicate poverty in the poorest states, our oil wealth came to be channeled into our political and politically-linked class,” the first Petronas chief and former Umno vice president said in a speech at the Young Corporate Malaysians Summit.


He said Petronas money had been used as a slush fund to prop up authoritarian rule, to corrupt the entire political and business elite and to erode constitutional democracy.
The Gua Musang MP told the conference that Petronas had contributed 40 percent to the national budget over the years.


But such a great reliance on oil income was getting untenable, he said. “The oil that was meant to spur our transition to a more humane, educated society has instead become a narcotic that provides economic quick fixes and hollow symbols such as the Petronas Towers.”


He said the future for Malaysians looks bleak with the government seeking to broaden the tax base by introducing a goods and services tax (GST), requiring Malaysians to pay an additional tax on top of income tax.


Malaysia is now caught in a middle-income trap, stuck in the pattern of easy growth from low-value-added manufacturing and component assembly and unable to make the leap to a knowledge-intensive economy, Tengku Razaleigh added.


Following is the text of his speech:


In a speech I made in April this year, I spoke of where we stand in our developmental path and what I felt we must do to move forward.


I need to revisit that argument in order to develop it further.We are stagnating. The signs of a low-growth economy are all around us. Wages are stagnant and the cost of living is rising.
We have not made much progress in becoming a knowledge and services based economy.
According to the World Bank, Malaysia’s share of GDP contributed by services was 46.2 percent in 1987. Ten years later, that share had grown by a mere 0.2 percent.


Between 1994 and 2007, real wages grew by 2.6 percent in the domestic sector and by 2.8 percent in the export sector, which is to say, they were flat over that 13-year period.
Meanwhile, our talent scenario is an example of perverse selection at its most ruinous. We are failing to retain our own young talent, people like yourselves, let alone attract international talent to relocate here, while we have had a massive influx of unskilled foreign labour. They now make up 30 to 40 percent of our workforce.


Alone in East Asia, the number of expatriate professionals here has decreased. Alone in East Asia, private sector wage increases follow government sector increases, instead of the other way around. We are losing doctors and scientists and have become Southeast Asia’s haven for low-cost labour.


I said that we are in a middle-income trap, stuck in the pattern of easy growth from low-value-added manufacturing and component assembly and unable to make the leap to a knowledge-intensive economy.


Regional competitors with larger, cheaper – and dare I say – hungrier labour forces have emerged. China and India have risen as both lower cost and higher technology producers, and with giant domestic markets.


The manufacturing sector which propelled the growth we enjoyed in the 90s is being hollowed out. There is no going back, there is no staying where we are, and we do not have a map for the way forward.


I am glad that the characterisation of Malaysia as being in a ‘middle-income-trap’ has been taken up by the government, and that the need for an economic story, or strategy, for Malaysia is now recognised.


We stand in particular need of such a model because we are a smallish economy. We cannot be good at everything, and we don’t have to be.


We need only make some reasonable bets in identifying and developing a focused set of growth drivers. It is not difficult to see what the elements of such a growth strategy might be. Whatever we come up with should build on our natural strengths, and our strengths include the following:
+ We are located at the crossroads of Asia, geographically and culturally, sitting alongside the most important oil route in the world.


+ We have large Muslim, Chinese and Indian populations that connect us to the three fastest growing places in the world today.


+ We have some of the largest and oldest rainforests in the world, a treasure house of bio-diversity when the greatest threat facing mankind as a whole now is ecological destruction, and the greatest technological advances are likely to come from bioscience.


+ We have the English language, a common law system, parliamentary democracy, good schools, an independent civil service and good infrastructure.


These advantages, however, are declining. Our cultural diversity is in danger of coming apart in bigotry, our rainforests are being logged out and planted over, our social and political institutions are decaying. I have spoken at length on different occasions about the causes and consequences of institutional decline. The decline in our society, and indeed in our natural environment, originates in a decline in our basic institutions.


The link between these is corruption. The destruction of our ecosystem, for example, is made possible by corrupt officials and business people. The uncontrolled influx of unskilled labour is a direct result of corruption.


These are problems we need to be aware of before we speak glibly about coming up with new strategies and new economic models. We need to understand where we are, and how we have gone wrong, before we can set things right.


You are young, well-educated Malaysians. Many among you have left for other shores. Record numbers of Malaysians, of all races, work abroad or have emigrated. Among these are some of our best people. They sense the stagnation I described.


There is a certain lack of energy, ingenuity and “hunger” in the climate of this country that young people are most sensitive to. In the globalised job market, young people instinctively leave the less simulating and creative environments for those that have a spark to them.
How did we lose our spark as a nation?


We have a political economy marked by dependence on easy options and easy wealth. Like personal dependencies, these bad habits provide temporary comfort but discourage the growth of creativity and resilience.


I mentioned our dependence on low-cost foreign labour.


The other dependence is something I played a part in making possible. This is a story I want to leave with you to ponder in your deliberations today.


Our nation is blessed with a modest quantity of oil reserves. As a young nation coming to terms with this natural bounty in the early 70s, our primary thought was to conserve that oil.
That is why, when Petronas was formed, we instituted the Petroleum Development Council. Its function was to advise the prime minister on how to conserve that oil and use it judiciously for national development. We knew our reserves would not last long.


We saw our oil reserves as an unearned bounty that would provide the money for modernisation and technology. We saw our oil within a developmental perspective. Our struggle then was to make the leap from an economy based on commodities and low-cost assembly and manufacturing to a more diverse economy based on high income jobs.


Aware that we had an insufficient tax base to make the capital investments needed to make the leap, we planned to apply oil royalties to what you would call today strategic investments in human capital.


Whatever money left after making cash payments, allocations for development funds, etc, was to be placed in a Heritage Fund for the future. The Heritage Fund was for education and social enrichment.


In working out the distribution of oil between the states, who had sovereign rights over it, and the federal government, we were guided by concerns for equity between all Malaysians, a concern to develop the poorer states (who also happened to be the oil rich states) and a concern for inter-generational equity. That oil was for special development purposes and it was not just meant for our generation.


Sabah and Sarawak joined Malaya to form Malaysia because of the promise of development funds. Yet today, despite their massive resources, they are some of our poorest states.
Instead of being our ace up the sleeve, however, our oil wealth became in effect a swag of money used to fund the government’s operational expenditure, to bail out failing companies, buy arms, build grandiose cities amidst cleared palm oil estates.


Instead of helping eradicate poverty in the poorest states, our oil wealth came to be channeled into the overseas bank accounts of our political and politically-linked class.


Instead of being the patrimony of all Malaysians, and for our children, it is used as a giant slush fund that has propped up authoritarian rule, eroded constitutional democracy and corrupted our entire political and business elite.


Our oil receipts, instead of being applied in the manner we planned upon the formation of Petronas, that is, according to its original developmental purpose, became a fund for the whims and fancy of whoever ran the country, without any accountability.


The oil that was meant to spur our transition to a more humane, educated society has instead become a narcotic that provides economic quick fixes and hollow symbols such as the Petronas towers.


Our oil wealth was meant to help us foster Malaysians capable of building the Twin Towers than hire foreigners to build them, a practice in which we preceded Dubai. I would rather have good government than grand government buildings filled with a demoralised civil service.
It is no wonder that we are no longer productive, no longer using our ingenuity to devise ways to improve ourselves and leap forward.


Malaysia is now an “oil cursed” country. We managed to arrive at this despite not having a lot of oil.


When I started Petronas in 1974, I did not realise I would see the day when I would wish we had not uncovered this bounty.


The story I have told is a reminder of the scale of the challenge of development. My generation of young people faced this challenge in the 60s and 70s. You face it now. The story tells us that development is about far more than picking strategies out of a box.


You have kindly invited me to address a seminar on strategies for reinventing and liberalising Malaysia’s economy. But the story of our squandered oil wealth reminds us that it was not for want of resources or strategies that we floundered.


Our failure has been political and moral. We have allowed greed and resentment to drive our politics and looked the other way or even gone along while public assets have been stolen in broad daylight.


I encourage you to take up the cause of national development with the ingenuity that earlier generations of Malaysians brought to this task, but the beginning of our journey must be a return to the basics of public life: the rule of law, honesty, truth-telling and the keeping of promises.


The Malaysia we need to recover is one that was founded on laws and led with integrity. With the hindsight of history we know such things are fragile and can be overturned in one generation, forgotten the next.


Without a living foundation in the basics, you might sense an air of unreality around our talk of reinventing ourselves, coming up with “a new economic model” and liberalising our economy.
So before we can reinvent ourselves, we need to reclaim our nation. That larger community, bound by laws, democratic and constitutional, is the context of economic progress, it is the context in which young people find hope, think generous thoughts and create tomorrow.

ISU YB NGAR KOR MING

Putar belit media masa Malaysia kini, macam mana kita nak percaya dengan media akhbar perdana Malaysia kini, banyak sangat manipulasinya. Betul jugak kata DSAI, propaganda media BN makin menjadi jadi...

Cuba baca komen YM Zul Noordin MP Kulim seperti yg tercatit dibawah.

Salam 2 all.Saya telah membaca lapuran berkaitan kenyataan YB Ngar Kor Ming (DAP-Taiping) yang didakwa mempertikai peruntukkan yang diberikan untuk pembinaan 611 buah masjid-masjid di Malaysia bagi tempoh daripada 2000-2008.

Saya dapati kenyataan beliau tidak saperti yang digambarkan oleh akhbar-akhbar.

Apa yang beliau katakan ialah mengapa peruntukkan untuk pembinaan rumah 'ibadah bukan Islam terlalu kecil berbanding dengan peruntukkan yang diberi untuk pembinaan masjid.

Pada saya tidak ada salahnya beliau sebagai seorang bukan Islam menanyakan soalan tersebut.

Beliau sama sekali tidak menolak hakikat bahawa Perlembagaan Persekutuan memberikan tanggungjawab kepada Kerajaan Persekutuan untuk membantu dan memberi peruntukkan membina pusat-pusat dan institusi-institusi Islam saperti sekolah agama dan masjid.

Malahan YB Ngar Kor Ming dan lain-lain pemimpin DAP menyedari dan menginsafi bahawa hak umat Islam menurut Perlembagaan Persekutuan adalah dijamin dan mesti dihormati.

Bagi maksud itulah suatu kerangka kerjasama dan persefahaman Pakatan Rakyat telah diisytiharkan dan ditandatangani oleh YB Dato Seri Anwar, YB Dato Seri Hj Hadi Awang dan YB Lim Kit Siang yang terang-terang menyebut bahawa kesemua komponen Pakatan Rakyat menghormati hak dan keistimewaan umat Islam saperti yang diperuntukkan dibawah Perlembagaan.

Saya percaya kenyataan YB Nga telah diputarbelitkan oleh pihak-pihak tertentu untuk agenda politik sempit bersifat chauvinistik perkauman.Malahan kita sebagai umat Islam sepatutnya menghormati hak penganut agama lain untuk rumah 'ibadat mereka.

Saya tidak nampak dimana salahnya mereka meminta sedikit bantuan untuk pembinaan rumah 'ibadat mereka.

Dibawah konsep daulah Islamiyyah, kita akan mera'ikan dan menghormati keperluan dan kebajikan golongan kafir dhimmi.Ianya berbeza kalau DAP mempertikaikan hak umat Islam dan tanggungjawab Kerajaan Persekutuan memberikan bantuan dan peruntukkan kepada umat Islam sebagaimana yang diberikan dibawah Perlembagaan.

Kalau itu berlaku, maka mereka akan termasuk golongan harbi. Dan kalau itu berlaku, saya akan menjadi orang pertama mengutuk mereka sekeras-kerasnya tanpa sebarang keraguan.

Dan sudah pasti saya akan ambil tindakan lebih jelas terhadap mereka.Tetapi bukan itu apa yang berlaku dalam kes ini.

YB Nga cuma meminta bantuan dan peruntukkan bagi pembinaan rumah 'ibadat bukan Islam. Beliau tidak mempertikaikan hak umat Islam membina masjid! Walaupun tidak menjadi tanggungjawab Kerajaan menurut Perlembagaan dan undang-undang negara, namun kalau kita ada lebihan peruntukkan apa salahnya membantu mereka.

Selagi pembinaannya tidak menganggu umat Islam saperti apa yang berlaku di Seksyen 23 Shah Alam, saya kira kita patut pertimbangkan. Kalau ada kita bagi sedikit bantuan, kalau tidak ada kita kata sahaja tidak ada..habis cerita.

Cuba bandingkan itu dengan tindakan orang Melayu sendiri yang menjual tanah rezab Masjid kepada syarikat bukan Islam saperti yang dilakukan oleh Majlis Agama Islam Wilayah di Sri Hartamas, Danau Kota dan lain-lain!

Cuba bandingkan dengan sikap orang melayu yang menarik balik peruntukkan Sekolah Agama Rakyat sehingga menyebabkan banyak SAR yang hari ini lumpoh, lesu dan ada yang terus hilang ghaibul ghuyub! Bagaimana pula dengan perangai orang melayu yang mematikan institusi masjid dan mimbar dengan menyekat aktiviti 'ilmu dan da'wah di surau dan masjid?

Bagaimana pula sikap kita orang melayu dengan kenyataan yang dibuat oleh Parti Gerakan dalam konvensyen PGRM di Ipoh pada 08 Dis lepas yang mempertikaikan usaha kita untuk memartabatkan Islam, malahan mendesak supaya negara ini mengamalkan 'amalan sekular yang sebenarnya! Kita tidak lupa inilah parti yang sama yang menyatakan orang Melayu adalah pendatang dalam negerinya sendiri!

Dan saya tidak lihat akhbar atau pemimpin melayu mengkritik Parti Gerakan, atau mengambil tindakan tegas terhadap PGRM, Malahan semasa saya bangkitkan isu penjualan tanah-tanah masjid di Kuala Lumpur oleh MAIWP ini, tiada seorang pun wakil rakyat melayu yang bangun menyokong atau membantu saya.

Mereka diam sahaja seribu bahasa!Sebenarnya penghinaan terhadap agama Islam dan institusi Islam dalam negara ini banyak berlaku ditangan orang melayu sendiri. Kalau kafir yang buat kita sedia maklum memang itu kerja dia.

Tapi kalau melayu yang buat, apa label yang kita nak bagi..pengkhianat?munafik?Sebab itu saya menyeru kaum saya bangsa melayu supaya sedar dan insaflah kita, bahawa nasib masadepan bangsa kita terletak kepada Islam.

Kembali lah kita kepada ajaran Islam yang sebenar menurut Al Quran dan Sunnah Rasul, bersama kita menggembeling tenaga menyeru manusia kepada yang ma'ruf, dan mencegah kemungkaran, dan beriman kita dengan sebenar iman kepada ALLAH, nescaya kita akan dipelihara oleh ALLAH dan dimuliakan manusia insyallah.

Wassalam.

Zulkifli Bin NoordinKhamis22 Zulhijjah 143010 Disember 2009

Dagestani pilgrims’ journey of faith real test of patience

renung baik baik.....

Most of us may not know the existence of Dagestan, a republic in the Russian Federation.
Dagestani pilgrims’ journey of faith real test of patienceBadea Abu Al-Naja

MAKKAH: Haj 2009 may have come and gone, but for Abdul Fattah Dove, a 30-year-old pilgrim from the Republic of Dagestan in the Russian Federation, this journey will remain in his memory for the rest of his life.

Dove said his journey to Makkah took him a month because his car was old and unreliable. He said it took him years to save up the money for the most affordable Haj visa, the one that doesn’t come with transportation, room and board.

“I refused to marry so as not to lose anything of the amount of money I had collected,” he said.
Dove said when he reached Makkah, he sought shelter in the city’s Kudai district where many of the pilgrims from the Russian Federation stay.

“I lived at the water-distribution station there,” he said. “The hospitable Saudi citizens supplied us with food throughout our stay.”

Dove, who was preparing to leave for home recently, was overjoyed that he had finally come to Saudi Arabia and performed Haj.

“I have realized my dream,” he said. “I can now marry.”

Abdul Aziz Yuv, 32, said many pilgrims from Dagestan and other places in the Russian Federation are faced with Haj-tour fees of up to $10,000, a princely sum for most people.
“I cannot afford to pay such a big amount of money, so I agreed with a number of other pilgrims from my country to pay only the minimum charge of the Haj visa and to do all other things on our own, including transport, accommodation and food,” he said.

Yuv said his group crossed Azerbaijan and Iran in a rickety bus. The trip took three weeks. It took Yuv six years to save the money needed for the journey he considered urgent, because “you never know when you are going to die.”

“I brought a small tent, which I erected near the water distribution station with other pilgrims from Russian countries. The moment we arrived, Saudi citizens started supplying us with large quantities of food on a daily basis,” he said.

Aminu Kuv, a 75-year-old Dagestani pilgrim, said it took him 30 years as a farmer to save the money to perform Haj. “One of my relatives had an old minibus,” he said. “All seven of us got into this minibus and reached Makkah after a month.”

Kuv said he brought with him some Russian products, including electric tools, knives and photographic equipment to sell during the Haj to help cover the cost of the pilgrimage.
Commenting on the phenomenon of pilgrims going to extreme lengths to be able to come to Haj, Sheikh Muhammad Al-Suhaili, the imam of Princess Sheikha Mosque in Makkah, said though these people were not obliged to do the Haj considering their financially inability, their insistence to come to Makkah is evidence of their strong convictions and faith.

“I often tell the story of a young man from Chechnya who walked from his home to Saudi Arabia,” he said. The imam recalled that the young man also walked from Makkah to Madinah to pay homage to the Prophet (peace be upon him) and pray at his mosque.

“Islam does not ask people to save money throughout their lives in order to be able to do the Haj or walk all the distance from their countries to Makkah, but when these people watch pilgrims doing tawaf (circumambulation of the Kaaba) or standing at Mount Arafat they feel such a yearning that they sacrifice to come,” he said.

4 YEARS IN JAIL FOR THE RAPE THAT NEVER HAPPEN

Macam ada persamaan pula dengan kes Saiful keatas Dato' Sri Anwar Ibrahim. Apa - apa pun kita tunggu masa perbicaraan nanti.

A man behind bars for nearly four years for a gang rape that never happened was cleared Thursday after his accuser admitted she lied to make her friends feel sorry for her.

William McCaffrey hugged his lawyer after the same judge who had sentenced him to 20 years in prison threw out the case and apologised.

"I've been waiting for this for a long time," the soft-spoken McCaffrey, 32, said outside a Manhattan court. "I'm just glad it's over."

New DNA tests played a part, but his exoneration largely hinged on his accuser's recantation - a rarity after rape convictions, the head of a national prosecutors' group said.

McCaffrey hugged his lawyer after the judge who sentenced him to 20 years threw out the case and apologised State Supreme Court Justice Richard Carruthers called the case "a catastrophe" for both the criminal justice system and McCaffrey, who was in jail or prison from his 2005 arrest to his release on $5,000 bail in September.

"I convey to you my personal regrets for having participated, though unknowingly, in the injustice," said Carruthers, who had called the purported attack "disgusting" during McCaffrey's 2006 sentencing.

Biurny Peguero, then 22, originally said three men, led by McCaffrey, raped her at knifepoint after luring her into their car after a night out in 2005.

McCaffrey said she had agreed to go with them to a party, and they dropped her off unharmed after she changed her mind.

Peguero told her story to a grand jury, took the stand again McCaffery's trial and said at his 2006 sentencing that the "tragedy changed my life forever."

He was convicted of charges including rape and kidnapping and got a 20-year prison term. No one else was convicted.

Defense lawyer Glenn A. Garber of the Exoneration Initiative, a New York-based group that provides free legal help challenging convictions, later persuaded prosecutors to use new technology to retest DNA samples from an apparent bite mark on Peguero's arm.

The initial tests were inconclusive. The new ones showed the genetic material not only wasn't McCaffrey's but came from at least two women, apparently friends of Peguero's who fought with her.
Separately, Peguero confessed her lie to a priest and then to authorities this year.
She claimed she was raped because she wanted her friends "to feel badly" for her, and then was afraid to back down from her story as the case continued, prosecutors said in court filings this fall.

Biurny Peguero admitted the lie and has pleaded guilty to perjury
She thought McCaffrey ultimately would be acquitted because of a lack of other evidence, prosecutors said.

"People, you know, can manipulate the system, and this woman did in this case," Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said Thursday while discussing an unrelated case with reporters. "But she's paying a price for it."

Peguero, who now uses the name Biurny Gonzalez, pleaded guilty Monday to perjury.
The mother of two - the youngest born last month _ could face up to seven years in prison at her sentencing, set for February.Her lawyer, Paul Callan, said she was "very, very happy" about McCaffrey's vindication.

"My client has been working diligently over the last seven months to see that this day would come," he said.

Statistics on the prevalence of recanted rape allegations vary widely, but most unravel before anyone is convicted, said Scott Burns, the executive director of the National District Attorneys Association and the former DA of southwest Utah's Iron County.

Law enforcement officials and women's advocates have striven for decades to ensure sexual assault allegations are taken seriously, "so it's extremely damaging when this happens," Burns said.-AP

THE QUESTION : DO FORMATIONS HAVE TO BE SYMMETRICAL?

England ni negara yang mempelopori sukan bolasepak. Marketing sukan ini cukup bagus. 5 billion umat manusia tonton BPL setiap minggu. Tapi sayang, diperingkat antarabangsa, team England ini dimata saya dikira sebagai overatted. Tidak bagus mana pun pemainnya. Glamour dan kaya raya mungkin.

Menjuarai Piala Dunia 1966 pun tidak diiktiraf oleh kebanyakkan negara. Gol ketiga yang menjadi kontroversi sehingga kini. Mungkin tahun depan ada harapan kot sebab Capello mengemudi pasukan.

Sekiranya team England ini tidak layak ke Piala Dunia ataupun Kejohanan Negara Eropah, alamat rugilah penganjur temasya. Marketing jatuh.

Pada saya, favourite team tetap Samba Brazil & Germany. Spain & France? antara favourite shj, nak menang susah kecuali France. Mungkin melalui konspirasi diantara Sepp Blatter dengan Platini. Tengok sudah isu Handball Henry baru - baru ini.

Guardian Unlimited : England's lack of a natural left-winger is often seen to be their weakness, but Fabio Capello has turned it into an advantage

The England coach, Fabio Capello, has found a way to combine Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney to potentially useful effect.

England, we keep being told – and the criticism was particularly in vogue after the defeat to Brazil in Qatar, as though a defeat for a side missing 16 potential members of next summer's World Cup squad invalidated two years of progress under Fabio Capello – do not have width on their left side.

They don't, and it doesn't matter. When Capello protests against such designations as 4-4-2 or 4-2-3-1, it is presumably these tiresome arguments he is looking to avoid. Formations are useful, but crude, tools to give a general idea of shape, more relevant to those of us describing the game than those playing it. They are not Platonic ideals to which sides should attempt to live up. To insist that a side playing what we, for instance, call 4-2-3-1, must have a winger on each side is to allow the cart to drive the horse.

England in the World Cup qualifiers found a highly effective way of playing, so effective that they scored six more goals in European qualifying than any other nation (and before anybody argues they had an easy group, remember that no other European group featured three teams who had played at the 2006 World Cup; and that no side had ever beaten Croatia in a competitive fixture in Zagreb until Capello's England went there and shattered their self-belief with a 4-1 win). Just because that way of playing doesn't conveniently fit any default template does not diminish it; in fact, if anything, it may give it greater validity by making it harder to combat.

The Scottish way

Asymmetry has always been part of the game. The earliest extant description of a formation describes how England lined up against Scotland in the first international in 1872. According to notes made by Charles Alcock, the secretary of the FA, England's team was made up of a "goal", a "three-quarter back", a "half-back", a "fly-kick", four players listed simply as "middle", two as "left side" and one as "right side", which sounds like a lop-sided 1-2-7.

The 1-2-7 seems to have been standard, but we have no way of knowing whether it was usual to overload the left. It may be simply that those were the players available to make the long journey from London to Glasgow. Or the shape may reflect the early style of play. Football at the time – at least until Scotland showcased passing in that match – was based on head-down dribbling, with the occasional long ball to clear the lines (hence the "fly-kick"). Assuming a preponderance of right-footers, it may be that they were more effective cutting in from the left towards goal, and it similarly is logical to assume that the natural trajectory for a right-footed fly-kick would be to send the ball on a diagonal towards the left side.

Either way, Scotland held England 0-0, their concern over England's weight advantage leading them to adopt a 2-2-6 and pass the ball to keep it away from their larger opponents. That style slowly spread, and as 2-2-6 became 2-3-5, symmetry ruled, at least in terms of how newspapers presented formations. That changed with the alteration of the offside law in 1925 so that only two defensive players rather than three were needed to play a forward onside, as teams began to withdraw their centre-half into the back-line to give added defensive solidity.
It soon became apparent that that left a side short in midfield, and so, at Arsenal, Charlie Buchan, an inside-right, dropped deep to provide cover; that unbalanced the team, though, and in time the inside-left also dropped, creating the symmetrical 3-2-2-3 or W-M.

The Brazilian re-emergence

The W-M gradually spread through Europe, but it was after it had been exported to Brazil that asymmetry became formalised in a formation for the first time. It was taken across the Atlantic in 1937 by Dori Kurschner, a Jewish former Hungary international fleeing anti-Semitism in his homeland. He became coach of Flamengo, but lasted only a year as players, fans and journalists derided his supposedly defensive approach. Kurschner had replaced Flávio Costa, who stayed on as his assistant, and undermined his boss at every turn, taking advantage of his lack of Portuguese and mocking the new system.

When Kurschner was sacked, Costa was reappointed. By then, he had become a convert to the W-M, but having spent 12 months sneering at it, he couldn't admit as much. Instead he came up with what he insisted was a new formation, the diagonal, in which the central square of the W-M was tipped to become a rhombus, with one of the wing-halves slightly deeper than the other, and one of the inside-forwards slightly advanced.

There were those, such as the Portugal coach Cândido de Oliveria, who dismissed the diagonal as nothing more than a repackaging of the W-M, but perhaps it is fairer to say that Costa formalised an unspoken process that was inherent in the W-M. One inside-forward would always be more creative than the other; one half-back more defensive.

At Arsenal in the 1930s, as their former centre-half Bernard Joy explains in Soccer Tactics, the left-half Wilf Copping played deep, with the right-half Jack Crayston given more freedom. When the Wolves and England captain of the late 40s and early 50s, Billy Wright, who could also operate as a centre-half, played as a half-back, did he not play deeper than Billy Crook or Jimmy Dickinson?

Similarly, it was usual – perhaps giving credence to theories linking left-sidedness with creativity – for the inside-left to be more attacking than the inside-right, which is why the No10 rather than the No8 became lionised as the playmaker.

Costa also, whether consciously or not, began the evolution to 4-2-4, his defensive half-back eventually became a second centre-back, and the advanced inside-forward a second striker. Symmetry, briefly, returned, as Brazil won the World Cup in 1958, but by 1962, as others aped their 4-2-4 system, Brazil had moved on, using Mario Zagallo as a shuttling winger-cum-wide-midfielder on the left while Garrincha played as a more orthodox winger on the right: 4-2-4 had become an asymmetric 4-3-3.

Only when Alf Ramsey and Viktor Maslov did away with wingers altogether in the mid-60s did symmetry return, but for another two decades it was still common in those nations where a back-four was usual for one of the wide midfielders to be more attacking than the other. An extreme example came at Newcastle in the early 1980s as they played a 4-3-2 plus Chris Waddle operating on whichever flank he felt featured the weaker full-back.

Intriguingly, away at Chelsea this season, Manchester United played with what was essentially a midfield diamond, with Wayne Rooney as a lone central forward and Antonio Valencia wide on the right, a conscious asymmetry presumably designed to pen Ashley Cole back, a system more defensive in nature but essentially similar to that used by Brazil (and strangely similar to the way Argentina played in the 1966 World Cup, where Luis Artime was the lone centre-forward, and Oscar Más an isolated left-winger). The possibilities of asymmetry are still being explored in the modern game.

The Italian embrace

As the W-M was superseded, football tended to follow one of two paths: there was the Russo-Brazilian, flat back-four model; or there was the Swiss-Italian libero model. Catenaccio abandoned symmetry early.

Helenio Herrera's Internazionale featured, in Giacinto Facchetti, a marauding left-back, who was accommodated by having the nominal right-back, Tarcisio Burgnich, tuck in to become a de facto right-sided centre-back. The space he left at right-back was then covered by Jair, the right-winger, chugging back when necessary to cover as a tornante – a returner. The tornante itself can be seen as a development of something that had been characteristic of football in Argentina since the late 1940s and River Plate's La Máquina side.

River's left-winger, Félix Loustau, became known as ventilador-wing (fan-wing) because his back-tracking gave air to the midfield. The centre-half and left-half could then shuffle right, which in turn allowed the nominal right-half Norberto Yácono to take on a man-marking role, tailing the opponent's most creative player (typically the inside-left), secure in the knowledge he would not be leaving a hole on the right side of midfield. The issue was less symmetry than balance.

Gradually Inter's system became formalised and developed into il gioco all'Italiano. "It was effective for a while," said Ludovico Maradei, a former chief football writer of La Gazzetta dello Sport, "and, by the late 1970s and early 1980s everybody in Italy was playing it. But that became its undoing. Everybody had the same system and it was rigidly reflected in the numbers players wore. The No9 was the centre-forward, 11 was the second striker who always attacked from the left, 7 the tornante on the right, 4 the deep-lying central midfielder, 10 the more attacking central midfielder and 8 the link-man, usually on the centre left, leaving space for 3, the left-back, to push on. Everyone marked man-to-man so it was all very predictable. 2 on 11, 3 on 7, 4 on 10, 5 on 9, 6 was the sweeper, 7 on 3, 8 on 8, 10 on 4, 9 on 5 and 11 on 2."

In other words, asymmetries matched, every system mapping neatly on to the one it was pitted against. The problem came when it met an incongruent asymmetry, as was exposed in Juventus's defeat to Hamburg in the 1983 European Cup final. Hamburg played with two forwards: a figurehead in Horst Hrubesch, with the Dane Lars Bastrup usually playing off him to the left. That suited Giovanni Trapattoni's Juventus, because it meant Bastrup could be marked by the right-back Claudio Gentile, while the left-back Antonio Cabrini would be free to attack.
Realising that, the Hamburg coach Ernst Happel switched Bastrup to the right, putting him up against Cabrini. Trapattoni, sticking with the man-to-man system, moved Gentile across to the left to mark Bastrup.

That, of course, left a hole on the right, which Marco Tardelli was supposed to drop back from midfield and fill. In practice, though, Tardelli was both neutered as an attacking force and failed adequately to cover the gap, through which Felix Magath ran to score the only goal of the game.
Symmetry does not equal balance

And that, really, is the advantage of asymmetry; it presents sides with unfamiliar and unpredictable problems. It also takes account of players' individual characteristics. There is something very reductive about the English convention of simply referring to players by position, so that players as dissimilar as Ronaldinho and Steve Stone can both be described as wingers. Other cultures – or certainly those of Italy and Argentina – seem to have a far richer vocabulary with which to describe players, which in turn perhaps leads to greater tactical sophistication as it becomes immediately obvious that setting up a team is not about drilling 10 round holes and hammering pegs into them whatever their shape.

Perhaps that is why it took an Italian to set England up in a coherent way. Capello is not hindered by the dogma that players must play in their best positions, because he does not see players simply as positions (at times it almost feels as though England is stuck in the early 1950s and the days of a selection committee who couldn't conceive of anything beyond a W-M and mechanically voted on who the best left-winger was, who the best left-half was, and gave next to no thought to how they might actually work together).

The thought that Steven Gerrard must play in his natural position through the middle (as though you could somehow pack him and Wayne Rooney into the same space and somehow make twice the impact) isn't a distraction because Gerrard to him is less a central midfielder than a bundle of attributes. Playing him to the left of Rooney allows him into cut in on to his stronger right foot, often arriving late into the penalty area and making him difficult to pick up. Given Rooney has a natural leftward drift, that creates an intriguing interplay that is difficult for defenders to counter.

Attacking width on that flank is provided by Ashley Cole who, as he proved against Arsenal on Sunday, is once again one of the most potent attacking full-backs in the world now that he has been let off the leash by Carlo Ancelotti. Add in Frank Lampard coming from a deeper left-centre position, and England have a diverse range of options from the left, with the more orthodox width of a Theo Walcott or Aaron Lennon on the right.

Perhaps you could quibble that it would be better if, rather than Glen Johnson, England had a more defensively minded right-back, given the lack of cover Walcott or Lennon will provide (although Johnson overlapping as Walcott cuts infield is an attractive prospect), and that in an ideal world Gareth Barry would be right-footed to complement Lampard and cover Johnson's surges. And it would be nice if Emile Heskey, as well as creating space, which he does superbly, could hit a barn door – but those are the sort of flaws that are inevitable in international football, where squads are given not constructed.

England at last have a coherent model of play. That it is not symmetrical is irrelevant; far more important is that it is balanced.