by Matt Riley
9th October, 2014
So there I was last Sunday bent double over the team bus barrier staring into the football abyss. An FA Cup semi final defeat to Chonburi had consigned Suphanburi to seasons without a realistic chance of reaching the final.
All the stars had aligned this year to knock out Thai FA-controlling SCG Muang Thong United and the Kingdom's strongest club, Buriram United. Since the competition was relaunched in 2008, apart from its first season back, all semi finals had included one or both of the clubs, so a narrow defeat to the possible TPL champions with the inconsistent and mid-table Bangkok Glass waiting in the final was a jagged pill to swallow.
From the other side of the barrier, one of my colleagues looked surprised and embarrassed by my dejection. "Jai yen yen. Next year we win!" Jai yen yen means very cold heart; a surprising phrase for such generally warm-hearted people. But it wasn't only my colleagues who responded in this classically Thai fashion.
As I sat on the team bus waiting to go, the Chonburi and Suphanburi staff mingled happily (which was good to see) but the joy seemed evenly spread between both clubs. If I hadn't been to the match, deciphering which team was one match from an AFC adventure and whose season essentially had just ended would have been problematic.
As a foreigner, it's a strange call to make. Being in the middle of this scene, I started to feel oddly selfish for being so disappointed. It seemed like my response was inappropriate and too negative, wrong-footing me and showing just how disparately different hemispheres approach the same love of football. Part of the tranquility is to prevent losing face. Our President left the stadium as soon as the game had finished, so gusts of grief like professional mourners at Kim Jon il's funeral would have drawn too much attention to our collective failure.
From a Western point of view, we have to show how much losing hurts to ensure we do it as little as possible (unless we support Aston Villa). The Thai approach to failure is often denial (FAT Head Worawi Makudi's "shock" at Thailand's rank of one hundred and fifty eight being a laughable example) and it stunts the ability of the Thai game to improve.
From the five stages of grief, Thai football only signs up to the first, Crisis, and the third, Upheaval. They ignore stage two, Unity, rarely demonstrate an appetite for stage four, Resolution and only reluctantly address the final stage of Renewal if they are forced to by an outside agency. In Sir Chris Hoy's excellent BBC documentary, "How To Win Gold" he inadvertently highlighted how Thai football is losing half the battle: "Champions are made by endless hard work and determination, by victory and defeat."
If Thai football can learn from failure, it has a huge reservoir of case studies to call on.
No comments:
Post a Comment