Mustafic Fahrudin is the first naturalised Singaporean football captain in history

By Les Tan

singapore vs vietnam soccer

Mustafic Fahrudin celebrating a Singapore goal in the warmup game against Vietnam. Mustafic becomes the first naturalised Singaporean to wear the captain’s arm band in an important international. (© Lai Jun Wei/Red Sports file photo)

When it became clear that Indra Sahdan Daud was dropped from the starting XI a day before their first game against Cambodia, the question was then: “Who would captain the Singapore national football team?”

The early guess was Lionel Lewis, the goalkeeper who, prior to the game, had played 58 times for his country.

However, coach Raddy Avramovic proved us all wrong when the letter ‘c’ showed up next to Mustafic Fahrudin’s name at the start of the game, making Mustafic the first naturalised Singaporean to captain the national football team in an important international event.

So one more psychological barrier has been breached by a team that is essentially a world club team with two Nigerians (Agu Casmir, Precious Emuejeraye), two English (Daniel Bennett, John Wilkinson), two Serbians (Aleksandar Duric, Mustafic Fahrudin) and one Chinese (Shi Jiayi) who have become naturalised Singaporeans, blended in with one Eurasian (Lionel Lewis) and 14 Malays (Sunny, Baihakki, Noh Rahman, Ridhuan, Shahril, Alam Shah, Indra, Mustaqim, Isa, Ismail, Juma’at, Rosman, Shaiful, Hyrulnizam).

It was a sensible football choice fundamentally. An outfield player as a captain is always better than a goalkeeper who can’t communicate beyond his defenders and cannot engage a referee.

Mustafic, 27, with 40 caps after last night’s game, is a cool head and plays a neat, tidy defensive midfield role for the team. He rarely makes obvious mistakes and breeds confidence in the team.

Kudos to coach Raddy for making a brave but correct footballing choice.