My interview with Paul Hewitt, one of the first people to have a club dedicated English language website and write about Thai football in the wider media.
Please can you introduce yourself
Hello. My name is Paul Hewitt. I'm just about 40 years old (November 27th). I live and work in the Stamford and Rutland area in the East Midlands in England.
How, when and why did you get into Thai football?
Being footloose and fancy free and in my mid-20s, I made the decision, having holidayed there several times, to try my hand at being a teacher in Thailand. I just caught the tail end of the era when a foreigner could pitch up in Thailand with no experience, do a quick TEFL course, and get a job quite easily (I'm led to believe the rules have been tightened up since then - probably a good thing!). Having attended football matches on a more or less weekly basis since childhood there was never any question of me not trying to find matches to go to once in Thailand, though at the time I imagined it would more than likely be the national team where I'd get my live football fix as opposed to a local league team. I first saw the national team play on TV while I was still living in England. That was the 2006 Asian Games in Doha. I moved to Thailand in October 2007.
Why did you start supporting Nakorn Ratchasima?
Once in Thailand, and having "met someone" as one does, it became clear that my post-TEFL destination would be Nakhon Ratchasima. By good fortune, Korat was one of the few provinces at that time that had a team playing competitively. They played in the third tier Provincial League and that season (2008) were just one of two provinces from the whole of Isaan to have league representation - the other being Sakon Nakhon. So I felt very fortunate to have a team to watch at all.
What are your earliest memories and impressions of first going to watch the team?
My early impressions were great. I could get a song-taew (route 4) from the city centre to the municipal stadium with ease, and once there, after handing over a 20 baht admission fee, I watched a semi-professional football team play in front of a couple of hundred fans - precisely what I was used to in England as a fan of non-league Stamford AFC. The standard of football was ok. They tried to pass the ball anyway. I remember big home wins over Satun and Sakon Nakhon. There was a Nigerian forward called Osika and winger nicknamed "Jet Ka" (real name Boonyarit Latkrathok) who stood out. I was warmly welcomed by the fanclub and quickly assumed the role of "novelty farang fan" but I chose to sit with the quieter, plain-clothed fans at the other end of the main stand.
How did you get your information back then?
Fortunately, the team's fanclub, though small, was effective and well organised, and they ran a website which regularly updated fixtures and results. Though obviously not a Thai reader at the time, it didn't require a huge amount of deduction skills to work out the names and dates on the fixture list. And if I did get stuck, a tentative question in English on the website's lively forum usually elicited a helpful response. From that day to this the club has never had a better website, and yet that was launched in the early 2000's when the club was literally amateur and had a few dozen fans. Of course, to get Thai football news in English, the only place to go was the thaifootball.com forum. Much missed.
How did you feel about NRFC's move to the new stadium?
I was astonished at the time. The club moved there halfway through the 2008 season. It wasn't a response to the 2009 boom. But they got lucky with how things turned out in 2009 and it proved to be the right decision. The inconsistent provision of public transport to the stadium was frustrating but is pretty standard in Thai football. The club was actually close to moving back to the Army Stadium at the end of 2010 following a disappointing season and dwindling crowds.
What were your initial impressions of the new ground?
Well I had just arrived in Korat in time for the SEA Games in December 2007, so I was already familiar with it before NRFC moved there. And being a stadium nerd I had thoroughly researched it before I ever set foot in it! Obviously, the stadium was designed and built for an international track and field tournament, not for a domestic football club. As such the stadium perfectly fulfills its brief and I have overwhelmingly happy memories of the place. In an ideal world a purpose-built 15-20,000 capacity football-specific stadium within the city's boundaries would be great, and is probably achievable. But the club was effectively gifted an "oven ready" (sorry!), modern stadium by the SAT and would have been mad to turn it down.
What are your happiest memories of your time supporting NRFC?
I remember walking back to the fans' bus just after we had clinched promotion in the 2011 Regional League play-offs by beating North Bangkok 2-0 at the Thephasadin Stadium. As we walked we started chatting simply about the fixtures we were looking forward to next season: "Phuket away!", "derby matches against Khon Kaen", "Saraburi away - we'll take thousands!". There was so much that was dirty in Thai football: the politics, the corruption, the players' discipline. But that was such a pure and hopeful and almost childlike moment. You've just seen your team win promotion and you start dreaming of the promise of next season. Any football fan in the world who has ever experienced a promotion season will know that feeling.
And although not an NRFC memory as such, the 2010 King's Cup matches in Korat were very special occasions. And photographing Bryan Robson in front of Yamo was a surreal moment.
And least favourite?
I could talk about walk-offs or politician chairmen or missing out on the play-offs on the final day of the 2009 season. But it has to be the incident in 2015 when the club allowed 35,000 fans to enter a stadium containing a touch over 20,000 seats. That was the last straw for me and I subsequently mothballed the website and closed down the Twitter account. I've never really subscribed to TIT. I don't believe you leave your morals and ethics at passport control when you enter the country. What is wrong in England is wrong in Thailand. That is moral consistency. Filling a stadium to nearly double its capacity is wrong. There is no TIT justification for it nor a legal one. Without getting too political, it's worth noting that this year a section of young people have dispensed with a TIT mentality and see the snowball effect. TIT is a moral myth that benefits those that believe in the status quo.
What are the major differences between the NRFC you supported & the club today?
Well the club changed beyond all recognition in the relatively short time I was supporting it. I personally had no problem with thousands of new fans appearing from 2009 onwards. My fundamental complaint throughout was how the management and organisation of the club didn't keep pace with the growth of the club's stature. The amount of times I had to tell those pleading agents and prospective players: "well actually the club doesn't have a phone number or email address". I know nothing of the club today so I can't make that comparison. I believe there is a purpose-built training ground so that's something. I would be surprised if there's an effective youth system.
When and why did you decide to start your website?
It was during the 2008 season. I knew absolutely nothing about website design (still don't) but I managed to work out how to set up a crude webpage on which I wrote match reports and a basic league table. Initially, I did it for nothing more than my own amusement. I only expected the handful of members from the thaifootball forum to read it. But it was just too basic in terms of what I wanted to do. I couldn't put photos on it and I was having to hand type the league table every week - things like that. I discovered the Clubwebsite brand of sports based websites which made things so much easier. The downside was a largely generic appearance but it had a template system which made it so easy to update tables and fixture lists, and add photos and so on. Moving over to Clubwebsite coupled with on the field success in 2009 meant that interest grew rapidly.
What sort of reaction did you get and who were the main visitors to the site?
It was positive. It was especially pleasing to reach other foreigners in Korat who had seen signs around the city promoting the club but couldn't work out when or where matches were being played! I was often told by other foreign fans that something as simple as a regularly updated fixture list was invaluable.
Judging by emails and messages I received, I had a mixture of curious Thai fans, foreign fans of Thai football, Korat farangs, players and of course, as we've all found out, agents offering players for trials. I only got involved twice with that sort of thing. I managed to help set up a trial for Frenchman David Lebras, who went on to be a club legend, and I took a gamble on a Canadian-Ukranian, who had spent some time in the youth system at Arsenal-Kyiv, who convinced me he was worth a trial. Apparently he lasted about thirty minutes before almost collapsing and wasn't heard of again. I recently found him on Facebook. He doesn't appear to have subsequently had a career in football.
What did you enjoy most about curating your website?
Researching the club's history. So little was known and so few records kept pre 2008 that it was a real challenge to piece things together. Stuff like player appearances and goal scorers and even match results in some cases are gone forever, but I did eventually manage to work out which stadiums were used in which seasons and I think we've got more or less complete league tables for every season going back to the club's formation in 1999. I particularly liked researching and photographing the former stadiums. One of which, the Rajabhat University Stadium, has since been demolished.
Please can you tell us a bit about your time writing for Big Chilli
I think Adam, the editor, had started going to Thai Port matches and wanted something about Thai football in the magazine. He contacted Nigel at ThaiLeagueFootball about writing a column and Nigel generously recommended me. The challenge was that the column had to be submitted about a week before it went to print and with it being a monthly magazine your content could be weeks old before someone read it, so there was no point making it too topical. This was ideal for me as it allowed me to write about broad issues such as corruption or crowd trouble, or general descriptive pieces such as articles about stadiums (of course!) or about English-language Thai football websites, or just simply writing about what clubs existed and where they played in an attempt to encourage readers to go to matches.
The remit was pretty broad but articles tended to be Bangkok-centric as the magazine mainly circulated in the capital and we agreed that it should be largely positive, encouraging people to give Thai football a chance, as opposed to an exposé of the darker side of the game. Although, inevitably, it wasn't always possible to keep those things out of the column. Just occasionally edits were made if my language describing certain FAT bosses or club owners was a little too florid. But by and large I was given free rein. My work with the Big Chilli was noticed by BK Magazine for whom I wrote a weekly blog on their website and occasional print article. But the idea was dropped after a while when they came to the conclusion their demographic was unlikely to be on the terraces of the PAT Stadium on a Saturday afternoon!
When I moved back to England I immediately informed Adam of my intention to stop writing the article as it seemed a bit phoney as I was now living on the other side of the world. But to my surprise he wanted me to continue and persuaded me to stay on. I gave it another couple of years and finally dropped it around the time that I gave up on NRFC. I recommended him some people that I thought could continue the column but he said he didn't want anyone else to do it if not me. I think in reality he was just grateful to have two pages back that he could sell for advertising!
There is now a lot of English coverage of Thai football. How does it feel to have been a pioneer of this and at the time, could you ever have imagined that this would happen?
"Pioneer" sounds like a strong word but I'll take a compliment as you never know when the next one is going to come along! When I was sitting on the concrete steps of the Municipal Stadium with 200 others in 2008 I did believe the club had potential to be bigger simply because of the size of Korat, but obviously I didn't expect so much to happen so quickly whilst I was there. Not just in Korat but throughout Thai football. Growth in 2009 was so extraordinary that it could never be sustained but the Thai football landscape now, in terms of participation, clubs, fans, visibility, awareness is undoubtedly in a better place than it was when I first discovered the local game. You can see kids in Soeng Sang district, 100 km southeast of Korat city wearing NRFC shirts. In 2007 people living next door to the stadium wouldn't have been aware that the city had a team!
What advice would you give to anyone writing about Thai football in English?
Learn to read Thai 555! Seriously, it's invaluable for the aforementioned research. If you really want to get into Thai football, particularly the history of club football, there's only so much you can learn from English sources. Even many Thai sources are very thin on information compared to what we might be used to in European countries.
How closely do you follow Thai football these days?
Beyond checking the league table every so often, not at all. I even stopped following the fortunes of the national team when I heard foreign fans had been inexplicably banned from sitting with the Thai fans. I don't even know where to begin with that one so I won't bother.
Is there a time when you can see your enthusiasm being restored?
Well I'd have to be living in Korat and attending matches. I moved back to England in April 2013, and I just couldn't maintain enthusiasm without actually attending matches. I pretty much stopped following Stamford's fortunes when I was living in Thailand for the same reason. I clearly just can't maintain interest in a team unless I can actually watch them play live.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
I can't go without mentioning people that I have met and friendships forged through Thai football. Especially you Dale, Russ and a certain mercurial Frenchman. It was a great ride and I hope it isn't over. I'm as guilty as anyone of wallowing in nostalgia, melancholia and wistfulness, so I've found it useful this year - this extraordinary year of all years - to remind myself that I am only roughly halfway through my life, not even that with a fair wind. I don't want to spend the rest of my life reminiscing about 2007-2013. I was very young when I moved over there; I'm still young today by farang expat standards! So Thailand and Thai football can still be a part of my future as well as my past. Watch this space!
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