3rd November, 2014
Reply #1
Name: Rob McEvoy
Twitter: @robmcevoythai
Highlights
Best Occasion - Thai Classico - MTU vs Buriram. A big game, good quality football at pace, edge. Could be anywhere in world watching that.
Best Atmosphere - Singhtarua, especially turning over Buriram at home. Great crowd, Cup Tie atmosphere underdogs working hard and coming out on top. Love that
Best Game - Thonburi City 2 Phetchaburi 3 - had everything. 5 goals, winner in last minute, red card, penalty, fight, walk off, noisy good size crowd saw Phetchaburi get into Play Offs and to top it off, free entry!
Best Tactics - Seeing Suphanburi play a formation without any Centre Midfielders and handing MTU their backsides. Dont expect tactical innovation in TPL
Biggest Surprise - Yamaha Division 1. I was dreading the 6 week break, but I haven't seen a bad Div 1 game yet.
Best Wait - arriving at a Police game to meet someone before the game to find the Police Pretties in catsuits having a photoshoot.
Best View - Watching a game on the sofa from a Presidents Box
Best Supporter Moment - Seeing Buriram fans hold up clocks and shout "Gee Morng" in response to the banning of "Kee Gong" chant. Good response to a stupid rule.
Favourite Player - Leandro @ Singhatarua. Looks like a park player, plays like one for 3/4s of the game, but when he turns it on does amazing things, and what a character.
Favourite Thai Player - Messi J.
Lowlights
Worst Game - Police United 0 Bkk United 0 in an empty Thammasart Stadium. Longest 2 hours of my life
Biggest Problem - English hooliganism stopped my family taking me to a lot of football when I was young. Shouldnt be allowed to take hold here.
Worst Player Moment - Boskovic from Korat having his 2 minutes of madness in League Cup Semi.
Worst Performance - Buriram United in League Cup Final. BEC Tero were good, Buriram awful.
Worst Deal - The Anton Ferdinand saga
Worst Moments - The hours of my life spent watching plainly uninjured men a yard from the touchline, forcing the ball to be kicked off, the wait for them to be stretchered off the pitch, then them immediately standing up and coming back on.
Least Favourite Thing - That my TPL Player of the Year and the Div 1 Player of the Year seem to spend most of their time behaving like a hungry 3 year old whose lost his mum. Great players but poor role models.
Special mention to Kai Hirano earlier in the season for his constant nuisance making. Loved it in a sneaky way.
Reply #2
Name: Tommie Duncan
Team supported: Singhtarua
Twitter: @TJRDBKK
A roller coaster season for Port fans
Highs-
Our start. Just a phenomenal effort from the team at the start of the season with the highlight perhaps being our defeat of Buriram at home 1-0.
Leandro's goal scoring continued in the TPL. I must admit that I had my doubts as to how effective he would be in the TPL given his limited mobility. Glad I was proven wrong as he was the top scorer in the league when he went down with his ACL injury and continued scoring after he returned. A very special player. Hope we have him next year. Don't think we would have survived without him.
Chanin's play. Great keeper. Made some amazing saves and very few mental mistakes. Solid Solid
The away trip to Chiang Rai. Great city and very welcoming fans
Seeing our team play on when an opponent falls down and fakes injury! All teams need to do this
Saruta
Seeing the big Serbian Sic finally get some form when we needed him most
Finishing 9th. Our real spot
Staying up despite all efforts to see us down. Amazing spirit and a big middle finger to FAT and the TPL
Lows-
Leandro's injury. It could have been a top 5 for us if he would have stayed healthy
Port supporter's behavior. Will they ever learn? Time for Port fans to grow up a bit. Honestly it is getting a bit tedious and is quite a turn off
Witnessing so much poor officiating with no real relief in site
The FAT and TPL. Seems they will never get it together. How about support and marketing?
Lee Sang Ho's crazy behavior. Dude has real anger management issues. Medication perhaps?
Having to sweat the last three weeks when survival should have been a given
Seeing fences and gates put up all over PAT. Feels like a prison
Krokrit being recalled to Chonburi. He was amazing for us. We never really replaced him
Chonburi losing the title on a bad call. VIDEO REPLAY PLEASE. This is 2014! Time for football to get it together
Reply #3
Name: Roger Smith
Team supported: Buriram Utd
Twitter: @Binnsy1
Highs
Retaining the TPL title has to be the high when you consider the very mediocre start to the season. This past season most of the teams in the TPL seemed to be below par and this allowed Buriram United to achieve back to back titles.
The 4-0 thrashing of Suphanburi back in September was the highlight of the home games and the 1-0 win at the not so mighty Muang Thong was the highlight of the away TPL games.
Lows
Being knocked out of the AFC in the group stage was a low point with the 4-0 defeat away at Osaka was a shocking performance.
Losing the Toyota Cup Final against BEC Tero 2-0 was a very poor performance and the score could have been a lot worse.
The 1-1 draw against Samut Songkhan at the I-Mobile was the low point at home in the TPL.
In the league another very poor performance was dished up at Bangkok Glass who ran out comfortable 3-0 winners. Also the performance at Singh Tarua was not what I had come to expect from Buriram
Carmelogate really highlighted that something has to change within the FAT/TPL.The conflict of interests needs to be looked at with the ties with Muang Thong for the sake of the FAT/TPL’s credibility.
Reply #4
Name: Paul Murphy
Team Supported: Army Utd
Twitter: @PaulmurphyBKK
Low points
Title race ending in predictable controversy. Chonburi’s threat to the big two quashed at the death by an errant flag. We may never know if it was just another ‘honest mistake’.
Crowd trouble at Thai Port- Muang Thong and the completely inept response of the police
TPL response to Thai Port-Muang Thong trouble – Punitive measures and no plan for how to combat hooliganism more effectively
The Carmelo Gonzalez saga. Once again, disproportionate punishment is meted out instead of establishing set standards to apply.
High Points
Although it proved the winner against Army Utd, Leandro’s overhead kick to give Thai Port victory was a stunning goal
Raphael Botti’s brilliant opportunist strike for Army Utd against Buriram Utd
Suphanburi’s 5-2 mauling of Muang Thong
Mano Polking’s brilliant impact at Bangkok United to stick two fingers up at those who got rid of him at Suphanburi.
Reply #5
Name: Eddie Smillie
Team supported: Singhtarua
Twitter: @eddiesmillie91
A surprise year for a lot of Thai football fans I think. In the end, Buriram win again.
As a Tarua fan promotion was great, we came into the TPL with a pretty much brand new team apart from the stars from our Division 1 team.. I think 4 or 5 players stayed with us.. 2 of which started in the first team (Leandro and Krokrit). Apart from these 2 great players, nobody really knew what to expect from our team, were we capable and worthy of the TPL? nobody knew!
To cut a long story short of TPL season 2014 for Singhtarua.. we certainly was capable!
Highs-
Unbeaten in our first 7 TPL games.. 5 wins 2 draws. You can only imagine how excited we all was about our form!
At an early stage in the season (within the first 7 games) we was 1st in the TPL table (it means nothing but makes a nice photograph).
Our new team was a good, strong team, despite one of our new highly rated Korean players had a serious shoulder injury at the beginning of the season which put him out of action for a few months.
Beating Buriram at home, a big thanks to our goalkeeper Chanin for that result.. and a sloppy looking Buriram attack.
PAT stadium had a clean up event in which fans went to the stadium to help repair/restore and clean the facilities, a great pre season get together and a chance for us fan to give something back to the club.
Finishing the season by out-classing our fellow promo-tees from division 1.. the other 2 teams (Airforce, PTT) are on their way back down sadly for them.
Leandro staying with the club after so much pre-season speculation that he was on his way out, he is a player for us that makes his other team mates more confident just by his presence on the pitch, probably a role model for a lot of young Thai players in the team.
Despite having a new team, the nitty, gritty fight (on the field) that Tarua had last season and the want to win mentality, we managed to inject into out new team and it won us games on many occasions!
Lastly the biggest high is obviously managing to stay in the TPL after deducted points.. we pretty much had to win our last 3 games, all of them tough teams and 2 of the 3 games were away not to mention we was not allowed fans, which sums up the previous note i left.
Lows-
Well where to start here.. many lows this season. I will start with the thing that annoys me most about football fans.
GLORY SUPPORTERS!! Singhtarua fan club must of doubled because of promotion.. obviously great for ticket sales and the for finances.. but in particular, we have quite a big group of foreign supporters at Singhtarua, I started supporting them at the beginning of 2013 when we were in Division 1.. i got to know the group of foreigners well and now good friends with all the 'usual suspect of football' (you all know who you are).. following promotion i started seeing new faces but other Port fans knew these people from when they supported the team when they were in the TPL before... maybe i am being harsh but i'm quite a passionate football fan and i have no time for glory hunters like that.. especially when they diss the team and the fans... moan over.. lol.
Ok so as i said before Kim, our center midfielder broke or fractured his shoulder early in the season which put him out of action for a few months.
Leandro picked up a serious injury in our Cup tie with Swat Cat.. which we lost too! double strike that day! and very worrying knowing that Leandro was out for 3-4 months.. it's safe to say we were very very worried thinking about where our goals would come from.
One of our leaders of our fans Moo Tarua (as he is known) set a big campaign up to get Worawi Makudi out of Thai Football, actually a lot of people from teams all over Thailand provided Moo with votes to get this guy out.. Moo has been on TV and had interviews about the topic of getting Worawi out... Now this is just my personal opinion.. But i think this left Tarua very vulnerable in the fact of being targeted for fines, punishments and whatever the TPL could throw at us.. for example -9 point and a further threat of -6 points... although i totally agree that Worawi needs to stand down and stop stalling the growth of Thai football.. i think Moo should of maybe tried a bit harder to keep the spotlight of the team he so passionately supports. Again this is just my opinion. A great campaign but maybe could be executed better!
Football hooliganism.. happens all over the world, FAT seem to make their own rules about punishments, i think setting up CCTV around stadiums and individually picking ring leaders and trouble causers out and giving them lengthy stadium bans is more than enough to stop fighting.. or reduce fighting.
To round it off, its been a great season for our team and also our brother/sister team Chonburi who unluckily missed out in being Champions. Good luck to them in ACL next year. Congrats to Buriram for winning!
Reply #6
Name: Vinnie
Team supported: Nakorn Ratchasima
Website: www.clubwebsite.co.uk/koratfc
Twitter: @NRFC_Unofficial
Highs:
1) Goals from Boskovic in the first half of the season.
2) Signing Lee Tuck.
3) Beating 4 TPL teams in cup competitions - especially 2-1 away at Tero.
4) Improved attendances.
5) Promotion!.
Lows:
1) Appallingly low standard of League 1 this season. Our team and performances this season were little better than in 2012 and 2013 yet we were never really challenged or pushed by promotion 'rivals' at anytime. Dreadful non-performance and capitulation by Navy at our place the epitome of this.
2) Poor disciplinary record. About 10 reds in all competitions - most of them deserved.
3) Club rejecting a youth academy proposal by someone with decades of experience in the field.
4) Apparent in-fighting at boardroom level allowing rumours of Watcharapol's resignation to come out in final weeks of the season taking some of the gloss and attention away from the team;s achievements.
5) Reports of low-quality training sessions with little or no time given over to tactics and defensive work.
6) Our fraud of a head coach. A trained chimp could have got us promoted this season. The former head coach of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands – and fourth choice for the Korat job – will get found out next season.
Reply #7
Name: Dominick Cartwright
Team supported: Singhtarua
Twitter: @dominick_1975
Highlights
1) Sisaket Away lovely town I have a friend who lives just outside Sisaket so I was staying at his place half the time. Good atmosphere great result, we ended up in a bar in singing songs and watching the world cup. Then some of the foreign Sisaket players came in apparently it's their regular bar all very friendly shook hands and wished them luck for the rest of the season.
2) Possibly the goal of the season, the goal that won the game at Army giving us hope of staying alive. A glorious overhead kick from the edge of the area, a great goal just when we needed it. Unfortunately at the time I was on the other side of town watching the game via the SMM live score website. Possibly the finest goal of the season was to me just a 1 changing to a 2 on my girlfriend's phone. I celebrated the goal everyone in the bar thought I was some nutter cheering at a phone.
3) Chonburi Away 1-0 down we never thought we would get much from the game and the crowd was a bit quiet resigned to the loss. Then I got on the megaphone and sung a song, while I was singing we scored! I'm taking that as an assist.
4) On Sunday night it took me about 1 hour to walk across the training field where we were having a Thai Port celebration dinner every ten yards I bumped into someone else I knew and there was constant supply of beers being put in my hand. Great people great to be part of the Thai Port Family.
Lowlights
1) Obviously the 9 point deduction after the fighting at Muangthong v Port. Unprecedented penalty massive effect for us Muangthong just out of a title race they were never really in.
2) Lee Sang Ho was foolish to try to head Dos Santos but he barely made any contact, essentially he touched him. There was contact a momentary delay and then Dos Santos went down like he'd been shot. One of the few times I have run down to the netting to shout particularly choice words at a specific opposition player. It was a moment of madness I lost it, there was only one other person who lost it more than me that was Lee Sang Ho.
Reply #8
Name: Kevin Watkin
Twitter: @wellywolf
Highs:
A more competitive league this season, rather than the procession of recent seasons
The Thai women qualifying for the World Cup, in spite of the way the game is run.
I was going to say Singh Tarua staying up despite 5 teams going down; however, it seems there's another twist in that story
Lows:
The childish posturing & bickering of Worawi & Newin. Their greed & self-interest is doing the game no favours.
The increasingly obviousness of outside influences on matches.
The inability of the FAT/TPL to take any material steps towards cleaning up blights on the game such as officiating standards, time-wasting & fan misbehaviour. It seems Worawi's only solution is money - throw at teams to inspire them, take it off clubs without any concrete steps to assist in either case.
The lack of transparency & consistency in punishments - these should be clearly set out and followed. You can't suddenly ramp these up at the end of the season, simply because it's felt there's more at stake. Also, the ease with which appeals reduced penalties early in the season.
The complete lack of irony or self-awareness shown by Buriram fans complaining about decisions not going their way.
The lack of a basic plan by administrators - still no reserve league, the ridiculous prioritising of U23s over senior national team, or the ability to stick to a schedule (apart from the odd monsoon)
The fact that the lows far outweigh the highs - a few years ago, it looked as though Thai football was on the verge of a golden era; these days, regression would be a more appropriate assessment.
No comments:
Post a Comment