[ How did you get into football? ]

I grew up not really being into sports, but I had family who were into football. They were big Arsenal fans, and we'd always hang out at their house over the weekends. We gather for meals there, stay late and then, watch the Premier League matches and Arsenal.

One day, I still remember it clearly. It was the 2006 Champions League Semi-final, Arsenal and Villarreal, the second leg at Villarreal’s stadium. It was nil-nil but Arsenal were leading one-nil on aggregate.

In the 89th minute, Arsenal gave away a penalty and Juan Román Riquelme, you know - a top player - stepped up to take it and everyone was like, ‘okay, extra time”. But then the Arsenal goalkeeper saved it! Everyone was freaking out and then Arsenal won. I remember being almost confused as a kid, I thought you won games by scoring goals not stopping them!

You know, as an impressionable kid you get very passionate about something and I got into goalkeeping, not even football. I got myself a pair of gloves and would play football with friends during recess. So that’s how I got interested. I blame Jens Lehmann!

[ You focused quite early on becoming a coach, why? ]

My dad is a public speaker or even a motivational speaker and also an educator. I’ve always been immersed in that since I was a kid, even though I didn't really take any specific notice or interest.

But when I started with football, I think I just had that knack for coaching. Looking back at my journey, I've always wanted to share knowledge and help others - and also through that, help myself.

When I first started (playing), we rarely had goalkeeper training. I'd get other goalkeepers around and share drills or techniques I’d seen in videos and just try it. So even back then I was taking it upon myself to share things. I just found it really interesting to learn about goalkeeping. I was really a nerd!

[ How did you find the job at Bournemouth? ]

I had to do an internship before I graduated from Baker and funny enough, an old friend of mine from the UK was working at AFC Bournemouth as the assistant goalkeeping coach, he posted on Facebook saying that they're looking for an intern in the goalkeeping department. I sent him a message like, ‘hey, can I apply for the position?’ A few steps later, I got the position and went there, initially for half the season (2018/19).

[ How common is it to find a position via social media? ]

It's rare, but networking can make or break whether you have a career in this industry. That's what I have come to learn in the past years. In football, so much is based on having people you can trust and understand around you - so tt’s much more rare to find someone new on social media.

[ What does networking look like in football? ]

It depends on which part of your career you’re in but when you're more junior, less experienced it’s about how many people you know, which coaches you've worked with, which clubs you’ve been at and coaches you’re friends with.

At Bournemouth for example, this coach, Anthony White, he's a very, very important mentor for me and we’re very close now. But the way we connected is very strange!

In college in the UK I went to a goalkeeping school run by Fred Barber, he was a coach at Bolton Wanderers in the Premier League at the time and he’s had this school for a long time and is very well known for it.

Well, Anthony happened to be one of the goalkeepers there, he was about 4 years my senior and we got to know each other because we trained together. We happened to live in the same area and he would give me lifts back home from training. We started becoming friends and would go down to the park for a kick around or some drills on days off.

Networking can also be, being diligent to film your sessions and then put things out there on Twitter or LinkedIn, which I need to be a lot better at! Or it could be making a good impression on coaches and players you’ve worked with, so one day, when they’re a head coach, they’ll think of me when they need a goalkeeping coach.

Another example is doing coaching licenses, not just the goalkeeping licenses, but also the general football coaching licenses. Many people there have just retired or started to coach, but in 10 years time, out of like 20 coaches in the course with you, 2 or 3 of them are going to be head coaches at whatever level.

I know friends who've studied at Harvard and MIT and places like that and it’s the same thing there. You never know, maybe the kid next to you is the one who will be CEO of the next multinational company. Coaching courses can be like that.

[ What does the ‘application’ and ‘interview process’ look like for coaching roles? ]

In all of the roles that I've received. There wasn't really a formal sit down interview process where they say, “send me a resume and ask questions like where do you see yourself in 3 years?”.

At one club, their new coach had been abroad for a while and didn’t have many connections in the country and needed to ask around. My name popped up and because he’d heard some good references from others, he gave me a call, we spoke for like 15 minutes and agreed to work together.

At another club, I reached out to the coach. I’d been following his progress for a while and just messaged him out of the blue, hoping to make a connection. We got on a call and agreed to meet for coffee (and I got a job).

[ What does a ‘performance review’/assessment look like for goalkeeping coaches? ]

You have to be wary about drawing equivalences between corporate structures and sport structures. There's definitely going to be clubs with some sort of corporate culture. But in my experience it’s very fluid and also depends on contract negotiations with the club and/or the situation at the club.

If the club is looking to develop young goalkeepers, for example, there might be a bonus in your contract if one of the goalkeepers gets called up to the national team - that sort of thing.

In the first team. It depends on the type of goalkeeper that you have. For example if it’s a very experienced keeper, like a Tim Howard at Colorado situation, where ‘success’ might be to make sure that he lasts for the whole season and maintains his current standard.

But if it's a bunch of young goalkeepers, well, are they actually showing progression? Are they showing signs of consistency and progression? That's how you show that you've done good work.

[ Outside of coaching licenses, what other skills and/or qualifications have you needed to pick up so far? ]

I would say that the most important skill for anybody who’s a coach or analyst is presentation skills, to be able to present information and get ideas across to anyone.

Learning how to present your ideas and to get buy-in was so important. Making a nice looking PowerPoint with fancy animations and transitions is all well and good but having to speak and have the charisma to hold someone’s attention in a room of footballers, who may or may not really respect what you’ve done in the game, is such a key skill.

As an analyst, learning to code, tag and edit/cut videos is a big time saver and really important to getting your point across effectively.

And then, obviously you will be held accountable by the actual performance, are there mistakes or bad results? In an ideal world you would be judged on how well you control the controllables and do your day-to-day work.

[ You’ve been coaching in diverse environments, have you ever had any issues with language barriers w/ the players or other coaches? ]

Actually, there was a big language barrier when I came back to Malaysia! I was 26 or 27, so I’d not lived in Malaysia for 12 years. One thing I had to really improve on was how I could communicate and relate to be able to coach effectively.

In Singapore, every team had foreign players, we had Japanese, Bosnian and Serbian players with a varying command of English. So when I did presentations, part of my job was to translate the English message into Japanese and Serbian.

Usually your foreign players are going to be the most important players in your team and if you're doing presentations and only speaking in English, and they're not getting the full idea, it’s not nice for them. So putting in time and effort to make sure they understand shows you care about them and can help generate a lot of buy-in.