With the glorious ending of the Asian Fooball Cup in Jakarta, the decision by Manchester United to skip Malaysia (simply for fear of infringing Fifa rules) had certainly saved Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi from a lot of embarrassment and ridicule.

Despite FAM's successful bid to be one of the four hosts for this year's AFC Championships (with Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam), our prime minister was nave enough to express his wishes to see MU coming to Malaysia to so-call 'add colour' to the 50th independence anniversary.

Of course, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi did it to fulfil the commercial needs of Malaysian companies like AirAsia, which is MU's official carrier for Asia and not least for his son-in-law Khairy Jamaluddin who is a fanatical supporter of MU and who may have some commercial interests as well in the MU's visit to play the Malaysian Selection.

Based on the results of their group matches, it is clear our Malaysian team is worse off compared to the other three hosts. Had MU made the trip here, they would made our players look like schoolboys. In that event, I just don't know where Pak Lah and all Malaysians would want to hide their faces.

After witnessing the world-class teams in this year's AFC Cup, we simply wonder what Pak Lah was thinking by personally asking for MU to come down. Luckily, MU bosses could see the danger and besides they can do without the pocket money from Malaysia.

Did Pak Lah think that the AFC Cup was just a 'Mickey Mouse' competition and he would not mind incurring the wrath of Fifa because his colonial mindset always thought that anything British (EPL) is the best in the world?

Now that we have seen the Iraq-Saudi final, we all know that even England doesn't take for granted that they can beat either one of these two Islamic nations, not to mention Iran.

Thus, by asking for MU to come to Malaysia and disrupt the AFC finals, Pak Lah has also angered the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) of which he is also the chairman.

In the end, Indonesia (whose national team also performed credibly in the group matches) got all the credits for the good job they did in staging their leg of the finals.

And what a thrilling final it was between Iraq and Saudi Arabia and what a climax it was when Iraq (whose players are playing all over the Arab world) put up such a great performance. In fact, there was very little to separate the two teams except for the great header by Iraqi captain, Younes Mahmud.

And what an irony for us too. Iraq's coach, Jorvan Viera, was employed by the FAM to coach our youth team but was sacked due to lack of immediate results. Amazingly, he brought success for Iraq merely on a two-month contract..

Eat your heart out Malaysia.