Yay? Singapore claim victory over Malaysia in Fifa punishment

The Lions have defeated Malaysia 3-0 in a football friendly on Sept 4.

If this is not the scoreline you recall, it is because Fifa has overturned the results of three Malaysian men's national team matches as part of the finding that they had fielded ineligible players.

It seems like sometimes in life, there can indeed be takebacks.

In a statement on Wednesday (Dec 17), the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) said that the world governing body's disciplinary committee has declared the team's matches against Cape Verde on May 29, Singapore on Sept 4 and Palestine on Sept 8 as losses with a default score of 3-0.

The association was also fined 10,000 Swiss francs (S$16,200) as punishment.

The match with Singapore was initially a 2-1 victory, while Cape Verde ended in a 1-1 draw and Palestine lost 1-0.

Although the Malaysia-Singapore match was not a competitive fixture, friendly results contribute to Fifa rankings, therefore the Lions stand to gain from this reversal.

FAM stated that it will make a written request to obtain the reasons for the decision from Fifa before considering the next steps regarding this matter.

The association's statement was widely circulated online, with the original Facebook post garnering over 6,400 likes and 2,700 comments at the time of this article's publication.

In September, Fifa suspended seven foreign-born Malaysia national team players for 12 months and fined FAM 350,000 Swiss francs for the alleged use of falsified documents to secure the players' eligibility for the team. 

These documents had claimed that the seven had Malaysian ancestry, which was debunked in a report released by Fifa in October.

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bhavya.rawat@asiaone.com