AS Malaysian football sank further into the depths of despair with the 6-0 humiliation at the hands of Oman four days ago, spare a thought for Datuk Yusoff Bakar, the country’s goalkeeper extraordinaire half a century ago, who is laying in hospital the past three months with wires and tubes running all over his body.
Yusoff, 80, a retired Prisons officer, is being treated at the Sultanah Bahiyah Hospital in Alor Star for all kinds of complications arising from a kidney ailment. But like always, he is a fighter, cheery but choking all the way as he spoke to me over the phone on Saturday until I cut the conversation short to enable him to rest. He was then venturing to talk about football “then and now”, which is every old timer’s passion, and that would have been extremely bad for his heart.
Another football great, former national coach Datuk M. Kuppan was at his side at that moment. But generally Yusoff has been more like a forgotten hero as not many had come to see him, a far cry from the days of yore when he received thundering cheers from the stands when he made those spectacular saves.
“Yes indeed,” said Kuppan. “He used to get the loudest applause as the spectators loved him. And there were occasions when he was voted player of the tournment.”
Yusoff was one of the key players for the Taiping Prisons team in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Prisons football club, which was run like a professional outfit then under team manager Tan Sri Murad Mohd Noor, came out winners many times in the FAM Cup and the local leagues. It produced several legendary players over the years such as Syed Ahmad, Namat Abdullah and too many more to list down.
Yusoff’s skills caught the eyes of Perak selectors and he earned a regular place in the state side in the Malaya Cup. From then on the stars shone brightly as eventually it was the Malayan national team which he represented for five years from 1959.
His debut for the national side was a big one no less — against the touring England team which had to fight hard to win 4-2. Kuppan was one of his teammates, along with legends like Ghani Minhat, Edwin Dutton, Stanley Gabriel, Ahmad Nazari, Chan Tuck Choy, M. Govindarajoo, Robert Choe, Arthur Koh, Kamaruddin Ahmad, Mok Wai Hong, Ng Boon Bee, Rahim Omar, M. Gunasegaran and Sexton Lourdes. Yusoff was voted man of the match many times in his career, including at the Vietnam Independence Day tournament in 1960 which featured the best teams in Asia.
Malaya was a force to be reckoned with then, and Oman or United Arab Emirates or other teams from West Asia were nowhere in sight. Kuppan remembers those days well and inevitably went on the “then and now” mode.
“Centralised training would require us to be stuck at the Merdeka Stadium all the time. The dressing room was where we slept, the passageway was where we had our meals and the field was where we trained”, said Kuppan.
“I remember we had to do most things ourselves, like wash our jerseys and clean our boots. Money and allowances were not foremost in our minds, let alone bonuses. Yet we were champions.”
Kuppan, like most other players from the golden era, had many other things to say about the standard, culture and system of football in the country today and many Malaysians already know what they are, so I won’t repeat them. But Yusoff has a special place in the heart of Kuppan.
“He is a very nice man. He was very agile as a goalkeeper and would dive full length, sometimes parallel to the ground, to make those wonderful saves. But in and out of the field, he has always been a nice, friendly person and I always remember him for that.”
According to son Yuzaily, Yusoff retired from the Prisons Department as its Kedah director in 1990 after serving for 33 years in all, and for a brief spell thereafter kept himself occupied helping out the Kedah football team under the late Datuk Ahmad Basri. In 2010, in one of the worst floods to hit Kedah, he lost some valuable photographs and sentimental mementos he had kept over the years.
Yusoff was conferred a Datuk by the Sultan of Kedah in 2013.
The writer is an award-winning columnist and a member of the National Sports Advisory Panel