We are not sure if there was any sort of protest from the state FA’s, but both Sabah and Sarawak would be playing their respective football matches on and during the biggest cultural related celebration in the both states.
Sabah would be flying off to Negeri Sembilan to play NS Matrix on the 29th of May, and will need to rush home to Sabah to entertain the same team on the 1st of June. This means Sabah players would not be able to celebrate the Kaamatan festival on the 31st of May as they would be on the road to their next match.
Similar to Sabah, Sarawak would be entertaining Perak on the 30th of May, before flying out to Ipoh to play Perak on the second day of Gawai Dayak. Gawai Dayak falls on the 1st and 2nd of June, and with such a small gap between the matches would means that the team would miss the celebration entirely as they would be on the road to their next venue.
Aside from Gawai and Kaamatan, the football schedule released by FAM also revealed that teams would be playing on the eve of this years Chinese New Year, with another three games also scheduled to happen at 9:30PM during the holy month of Ramadan.
It is not known if FAM did try their best to avoid such dates, but we would like to believe they did try to reschedule the matches without avail.
Nonetheless, with the schedules cramped to allow the Malaysian Leagues to finish just before Hari Raya Puasa, we can’t help but feel that there’s somewhat some injustice when it comes to which celebration gets prioritize.
That said, we personally feel that FAM could have done so much more to ensure that all major celebrations had been given ample time for celebrations because if FAM could allow matches to be played during Ramadan, Chinese New Year, Gawai and Kaamatan, they might as well allow matches to be played during Hari Raya too, for the sake of fairness.
