GOL?

by John Lim

Watching a football match in McDonald’s strikes me as an odd idea: The lights would be too bright, the floors too clean, and Apple Pies and Milkshakes too… well, not Malaysian-lah.  After all, the typical Malaysian match-watching experience often brings to mind downing enough teh-o-ais limaus for us to brave their toilets (or in the case of the SS2 mamak, hold it in desperately), eating greased-up Maggi Gorengs, and squinting at too-small TV screens placed across the roadside.

I walked into a 24-hour McDonald’s joint expecting the worse, the sterile antithesis of what it means to be a true-blue, mamak-toughened, bladder-stiffened, iron-gutted viewer. Chicken McNuggets and Fries? Poofy, sanitised food.

I expected a rubbish experience, nowhere near as authentic as one watched in a dingy stall: surrounded by disinterested customers tinkering with their laptops and mobiles. Besides, McDonald’s isn’t known for being a hangout for watching sports; it just wasn’t built for it. A few years back, one of the outlets, having never designed a place for a big-screen viewing crowd, placed a 50-inch plasma screen on the side of the staircase like a Big Mac poster. It was a struggle to get past the hordes bobbing their heads as they walked past the screen.

What I didn’t expect at this new joint in Centrepoint were the HD televisions, cushioned booths, and a decent crowd that actually wanted to watch Italy vs Paraguay at 2.30am. This is, after all, Italy we’re talking about: they of the snooze-inducing brand of football that only discerning fans can grudgingly agree with, up against Paraguay, whose only notable name is Roque Santa Cruz: he of the of snooze-inducing brand of football that only Mark Hughes can agree with.

(Scoreline: 1-1, in typical Italian fashion of never starting too well)

The crowd that inexplicably turned out was an odd mix of midnight-owl stereotypes that you’d never see at the mamaks – including the solitary poser flipping through Nat Geo mags while the match was going on, and dressed-up college girls who somehow deem McDonald’s as a worthy venue – only to crash face-down on top of their textbooks.

What caught me off guard were the actual football fans there – those clasping-mouth, prayer-muttering, hands-in-the-air type of fans – which made me think that if there ever was a Gol? Project in 2022, our experiences of Malaysians watching football would inevitably contain depictions of air-conditioned stalls, clean tiled floors, and constant WiFi-on access. I’m also fairly certain that the essays would pine for the nostalgia of dimly-lit mamaks, of how the food is never quite the same as it was when the drain/rubbish dump was around the corner, and reminisce about the novel emergence of those HD screens.

The argument is an old one, laced with the fear that one day, what we think of a Malaysian way of watching the World Cup would one day be replaced by a homogenised corporate culture (worse still, an American corporation that calls it “soccer”). It’s also an argument that would be moot years from now – just ask the defenders of those mom-and-pop kedai runcits, kopitiams, and bookstores who protested against those soul-sucking big-money corporate chains.

No doubt that come the next World Cup, I’m more likely to watch Italy play Paraguay while having an ice-blended Mocha Frappucino than at the Maybank mamak in Section 14.

I don’t think I’ll complain about it; in fact, I’m more likely to welcome all its creature comforts, superior digital technology, and dressed-up college girls. But in the same way that my dad often waxes lyrical about the day when he watched days-old movie reels of Eusebio taking on North Korea at Rex cinema, I suspect that one day 12 years from now, I’ll be waxing lyrical about oily maggi gorengs, roadside televisions, and holding my pee in.

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