pass up the opportunity to train U21... Partly my fault for having conceived such an environment.
I don't agree with that statement. We always had a few foreign trainer helping with a quality trained young Malaysian player not we never managed to keep a foreign manger focused on training multiple Malaysian players. Most managers don't pay much attention to the nationality, if they got the trainee with the right potential / skillset, they will train him. One thing which may have changed during the recent past are the utopia draftee who are sometimes trained by the team which drafted them.
Getting foreign managers involve takes time and efforts. I didn't put up the needed time and efforts to have such a boost for our U21 NT. When I did so, the pool of potential trainees was too little to draw real interest, that's why I gave up.
One last word to why our U21 NT stays competitive, it's because our local managers are doing an incredible job at training young Malaysian players. There are some players with low potential who reach their cap at a very early age (Philip Joseph, Kaivalya Manjit) and others with more potential who may become NT potential candidates in a few seasons (Wei Wenqing, Siranjeevi Rajan). Here are 4 players from 4 different local teams, most probably the 4 most useful managers to our U21 NT. Those 4 are the fantastic 4, the 4 managers who allowed the U21 NT to remain competitive all those years by training Malaysian players each and every season. They should get the credit for our U21 NT good performances.