South-East Asia

Alongside perhaps the Middle East, South-East Asia stands out as one of the most marginalized and neglected regions within sports history. Only a handful of scholars have addressed issues of sport within any of the region’s 11 nations: Brunei, Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. This neglect is reflected by the low number of articles relating to the region that have appeared in the leading sports history journals. At the time of writing, the Journal of Sports History had never featured an article and the International Journal of the History of Sport only 12 (four of which were included in the same special issue devoted to sport in Asia). The paucity of coverage is highlighted even further when reflected against the size of

the region. South-East Asia is home to almost 10 percent of the world’s population. Indonesia, with over 230 million people, is the world’s fourth most populous nation, with the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand all placed within the top 20. Geographically, the region sits on a vital and vibrant global crossroads and is increasingly prosperous. Why, then, has it been so overlooked by sports historians? It is not only sports historians that have been negligent in this regard. Regional historians

have been equally unsuccessful integrating sport into their work. Sport is totally overlooked in works like Osborne’s standard historical text on the region, the four-volume Cambridge history, and the recent three-volume encyclopedia of the region, whilst the prestigious Journal of Southeast Asian Studies has only ever published one article on sport. The picture is similarly bleak with regard to histories of the individual regional nations, with the inclusion of a chapter on sport in a recent history of Singapore a rare exception to this trend.1

Part of the reason for this lack of attention is likely to be the fact that the region has never been a sporting powerhouse and, indeed, has returned unremarkable results in international competitions. The Olympic Games provides a case study of this. The Philippines were the first regional representatives2 at the games in 1924, and won a bronze medal at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympiad. Since then, however, the 11 nations have won only 50 further medals between them, and only Indonesia (which won the region’s first gold in 1992) and Thailand have even recorded gold (five each). Myanmar, Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor and Laos have won no medals, Singapore and Vietnam boast only a solitary silver each, Malaysia one silver and two bronze, and the Philippines two silver and seven bronze. Given the population of these states, these returns are relatively meagre. A similar pattern has been played out in association football. Only one regional side,

the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in 1938, has competed in the World Cup, and

they gained their place as the only team from Asia to enter the qualifying process.3 Since then no team has come close to qualifying for either the men’s or women’s World Cup, and in the most recent Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) rankings only Thailand (ranked 96th) is in the world’s top 100 nations.4 Even within Asian football, only Myanmar, where football was introduced in around 1879,5 has been a strong force. They were runners-up in the 1968 Asian Cup (the only team from the region to reach the final of this tournament), winning the gold medal at the Asian games in 1966 and 1970, and participating at the 1972 Olympics (where they obtained respectable results but failed to qualify for the group stages). John Cody, one of the few historians to touch onMyanmar sport, notes that ‘proficiency in soccer football [sic] became a significant mark of Burmese identity and prestige’.6