The Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) has actually found its spectacles and noticed that the refereeing in the recent Negeri Sembilan vs. JDT clash was, shall we say, a bit “creative.” S. Logeswaran and his VAR sidekick, Muhd Usaid Jamal, have been sent to the naughty corner—officially termed a “performance recovery and refinement phase.”

In layman’s terms: they’ve been sent back to school to learn that a football match is supposed to last 90 minutes, not “until Johor scores.” It is truly a feat of modern science that the concept of time becomes so fluid the moment a blue and red jersey enters the final third. I’ve seen glaciers move faster than the seconds on that stadium clock once we hit the 90-minute mark.

Let’s look at the facts, shall we? The board went up for seven minutes of added time. Fair enough. Players go down, keepers take their sweet time with goal kicks—we get it. But then, like a stubborn guest who won’t leave a party even after the lights have been turned off and the vacuuming has started, the game just… kept going. Suddenly, we’re in the 9th minute of stoppage time, and Manuel Hidalgo heads home a “golazo.”

JDT fans celebrated like they’d just conquered the galaxy, discovered the cure for the common cold, and won the World Cup all in one afternoon. But let’s be honest: celebrating a 1-0 win against Negeri Sembilan in the 99th minute is like a heavyweight boxing champion bragging because he finally managed to beat up a toddler after ten rounds of huffing and puffing. It’s not a triumph; it’s a cry for help. If you need a “bonus time” to break down a team that spent most of the match defending with the frantic energy of a man trying to plug a leaking dam with his fingers, you haven’t won; you’ve merely survived.

JDT isn’t just a club; it’s a financial superpower. With an annual budget hovering around RM120 million, they spend more than the next four or five clubs combined. JDT is more than capable of funding a small space programme, and their bench players earn enough to buy most of Seremban. When you have that kind of firepower—the best imports money can buy and a squad deep enough to field two title-winning teams—you shouldn’t be “edging” a win.

You should be turning the opposition into a fine crimson mist by halftime. To struggle until the final breath against a team whose total operating budget is likely the equivalent of JDT’s monthly laundry bill is, frankly, embarrassing. It’s like bringing a nuclear submarine to a fishing competition and then claiming victory because you finally caught a sardine.

“For JDT, a 1-0 win in the 99th minute shouldn’t be a ‘highlight’—it should be a cause for a formal internal inquiry and a public apology to the fans for wasting their Sunday.”

And let’s talk about this “golazo.” The propaganda machine would have you believe it was a masterstroke of tactical brilliance. In reality, it was the footballing equivalent of a student passing an exam because the teacher let them stay in the classroom for an extra hour after everyone else had gone home. When you have the luxury of time that seems to expand at your will, eventually, the law of averages says you’ll score.

Negeri Sembilan played their hearts out. They defended like Spartans at Thermopylae, only to be undone by a clock that refused to stop. For a club that prides itself on being “The Best in Asia,” relying on such narrow, controversial margins against local opposition is a staggering admission of current inefficiency. If JDT were a corporation, the shareholders would be demanding a refund.

In the arrogant, gilded world of the Southern Tigers, the standards are meant to be sky-high, yet this performance was about as lofty as a basement. When you outspend your rivals by the GDP of a small island nation, a win is not an achievement—it is a basic requirement of your existence. Anything less than a four-goal thrashing should be viewed as a tactical disaster, and a draw should be treated with the same solemnity as a national day of mourning.

If JDT truly needs a referee to “forget” how to read a watch just to scrape past Negeri Sembilan, then the crown isn’t just slipping; it’s practically in the gutter. A loss in this context wouldn’t just be an upset; it would be grounds for the immediate sacking of the manager and perhaps a complete audit of the players’ commitment to the cause.

If this is what “dominance” looks like, then the only thing JDT is dominating is the league’s capacity for unintentional comedy. The referee has been suspended, but the stench of this “victory” will linger much longer than those extra nine minutes. We are told they are a professional outfit, the gold standard of Malaysian football. Well, if that was the gold standard, I’d suggest we start looking for a different currency.