Bangkok Utd 3-1 Chonburi - Match Report: 2010

TPL

Bangkok United 3-1 Chonburi

Venue : Bangkok University Rangsit Campus Stadium

Attendance: 1,576

Sunday 12th September, 2010

Match Report 

What a strange match this was. And not only because it was a carbon copy of the same fixture three years ago - three down at half time and a consolation in the second half. Chonburi didn't play badly - in fact some of the passing and movement was as good as any I've seen this season - and Bangkok United didn't play particularly well. However, the home side had a game plan and it worked. Ten men behind the ball, let us commit players forward and hit us on the break with a long ball for the speedy forwards to chase and stick in the net. Simple stuff.

Although they did abandon this tactic in the second half in favour of going down at every opportunity, waiting for a stretcher to arrive and then jumping up like Lazarus the moment it did. I lost count of the number of times this happened. I think they call it "breaking up the game". I prefer to call it cheating and the referees need to start dishing out yellow cards to those who do it. It's the most annoying aspect of Thai football.

Meanwhile, back at the match....Our strikers were having an off day. Things could have been so much different, if Ney Fabiano had put away a couple of seemingly easy chances, if Baga hadn't somehow managed to head the ball wide with most of the goal to aim at and if Pipob hadn't shot weakly at the keeper when put through. But that's football. It's all about who scores the most goals. And yesterday, that wasn't us.

I'm not sure if anyone was calculating the amount of possession each team had but I'm willing to bet that it was something like 80/20 in our favour. And that would have increased in a frantic last ten minutes when we threw everybody forward in a late attempt to save our title winning hopes. But it wasn't to be and Muang Thong may as well crack open the bubbly right now. It was a disappointing way to surrender the title but, as usual, the large away contigent - about 80% of the total attendance - kept singing and chanting throughout and all stayed behind to applaud our players off the pitch at the end.