Angmo Mgmt give their National Stadium fiasco performance A-, Minister Wong agrees!!

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Singapore Sports Hub fiasco: The farce continues, without full accountability or proper governance

Michael Y.P. Ang is a Singaporean freelance journalist. He worked at the former Singapore Sports Council before covering local and international sports for Channel NewsAsia for several years. Follow his Facebook page Michael Ang Sports for commentaries on sports issues that matter to Singaporeans.

COMMENT

By Michael Y.P. Ang

First, a sandy pitch. Then, a leaky roof. Sadly, the farce surrounding the Singapore Sports Hub has yet to fade away.

We know how self-assessment can be an empty activity. But that didn’t stop the senior management of SportsHub Pte Ltd (SHPL), which manages the Sports Hub, from grading its first six months of operations.

Speaking to The Straits Times during one of several separate meetings with individual media channels on Tuesday, SHPL’s CEO Philippe Collin Delavaud claimed the hub deserves an A-, while its chairman Mark Woodhams said “B+ is a realistic mark”.

Their unrealistic assessments show the two men are truly out of touch with the Singaporean public.

SHPL’s poor communication skills

Woodhams admitted to a TODAY journalist there were flaws in SHPL’s communication with the government and public regarding major issues.

However, instead of fully explaining how Singapore’s most important football ground became a national shame, SHPL has been trying to wow observers with near-meaningless numerical data, such as: "The first six months saw over 500,000 visitors to the National Stadium."

SHPL may find this an impressive figure, but what it means is that half a million people have witnessed first-hand how bad the pitch is.

Speaking of poor communication, Woodhams and Delavaud still haven’t publicly commented on why SHPL’s pitch master, Greg Gillin, was allowed to travel overseas excessively for a part-time consultancy last year when he was most needed at his full-time job at Kallang.

And curiously, Gillin had previously told TODAY that he quit in October to give six months' notice, and was to leave SHPL on 31 March. But a quick look at his LinkedIn account shows he has already started work at his new job at events company Live Nation this month.
Grandstand view
The unspoken issue

“It’s not him (Gillin) only. It’s governance,” Steven Yeo, former deputy executive director of the Singapore Sports Council (now Sport Singapore), said on Facebook last month, in response to my report 'Singapore Sports Hub fiasco: The Untold Story'.

Some are trying to assure Singaporeans that the Sports Hub's public-private partnership (PPP) model can still work. But to succeed, there must be full accountability and proper governance.

As late as mid-October, Gillin was still dismissing everyone’s pitch worries, claiming construction delays had given insufficient time for the grass to grow.

Shockingly, the government appeared to have bought Gillin’s excuse. On 4 November, Singapore’s de facto sports minister Lawrence Wong was found echoing the Australian’s flawed argument in Parliament: “SHPL had taken three months longer than expected to complete the National Stadium, and this meant that there was not enough time to allow the grass on the pitch to take root and stabilise.”

An equally shocking fact: The quintet of parliamentarians (including an MP with a sports management background in table tennis, an opposition MP and a nominated MP) who questioned the sports minister about this issue also failed to see Gillin’s excuse for what it is – illogical.

The National Stadium’s postponed reopening gave the SHPL three extra months to get everything ready, not less time. This fact appears to have also been lost on mainstream media.

If this is how the government and mainstream media continue to check on the private partner of a PPP, Singaporeans should be worried.
Possible hiccups during SEA Games

A recent Straits Times editorial called for sharper focus on pinpointing problems and tackling them. SHPL is aware of what’s at stake when Singapore hosts the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games in June. It has promised success.

Arguably, no reasonable person can fault SHPL for teething problems during the first two months of a mega project. But SHPL’s contingency planning and reaction time to a crisis are of questionable quality.

It’s impossible to foresee every eventuality. But going by SHPL's own reasoning, it should have prepared an alternative pitch the moment it knew of a construction delay, since it claims the delay was the very reason the original pitch didn't have time to get ready.

More hiccups are on the horizon if this lack of accountability allows poor governance to continue. A SEA Games disaster may even prompt the government to ditch SHPL. If so, who could be the replacement?

Our old National Stadium was managed by the fine men and women of the former Singapore Sports Council (SSC), now known as Sport Singapore.

While nobody knows if Sport Singapore will ever get to manage the Sports Hub in the future, it’s worth remembering: Previously, we had neither a costly stadium operator nor a costly pitch master, yet everything worked well – thanks to the SSC team and its own humble groundsmen maintaining the Grand Old Dame's Kallang pitch.


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