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The S.League experience
Antony Sutton
info@sleague.com
There’s only one way to watch a football match and that’s in the stadium. Yes TV is fine up to a point with its nifty camera angles and immediate punditry but nothing can replicate the sheer joy, or pain, of being in the stadium taking in the action first hand.
I’ve been lucky. Over the years I’ve seen games in England, Germany, Italy, as well as Australia, Indonesia and Singapore. One thing I learnt early on was to never compare. The game of football is the same but the culture surrounding it varies from country to country.
The war on the terraces of 1980’s England has been replaced by rubber necking tourists and slick marketing. In Germany the match day experience was defined by the drinking of beer then claiming a refund from the empty plastic glass! Indonesia’s fans are young but that doesn’t stop the cigarette smoke but it’s a major factor behind the sheer unbridled enthusiasm that flows down from the terraces each game.
Football is the world wide game with unified rules but football also mirrors its host society. Fans brought up on a diet of the English Premier League on TV shouldn’t go to an SLeague expecting to see thousands of fans singing You’ll Never Walk Alone with arms held aloft because that just isn’t going to happen. Instead sit back and enjoy the football; Singapore style.
The fans, like the country, are disciplined, squeaky clean. The Eastern Derby between Tampines Rovers and Geylang United isn’t going to be accompanied by brawling fans disrupting passengers on the MRT. The people are too ‘nice.’ The tannoy even welcomes visiting supporters and hopes they enjoy their short stay.
That’s not to say there isn’t any abuse. We are after all talking about football. But this is Singapore and yelling at he match officials is usually prefixed with an ‘excuse me.’
In such an orderly society it is perhaps surprising to see regulation breaking going on inside the stadiums. Match tickets specifically state ‘…banners, flags, poles, airhorns, whistles, drums, musical instruments’ are prohibited but fan club members it seems are exempted!
The atmosphere in the SLeague comes from these Fan Clubs, often with cheer leaders, who make a most of the percussion instruments they managed to smuggle past unsuspecting stewards, singing songs that vary little from club to club. Go go go (insert team name here) go, fight, fight, fight (insert team name here) fight, win, win, win (insert team name here) win, we are the (insert team name here) fans.
The anonymity of the players in the SLeague keeps football real to a degree many other countries have forgotten. Tell me another league where you will see the leading goalscorer queuing up for a bus after the game with his wife and children? While the media concentrates on players in the west holding their clubs to ransom or boasting about spending big cash on a Bentley it is refreshing and indeed ‘real’ to see said striker standing patiently at the stop, ignored by all but a blogger, a football journalist and a fan.
But for me what defines the SLeague experience as uniquely Singaporean comes at half time when half the crowd nip outside for a quick cigarette. The fan club members and cheer leaders settle down and dig into a packed lunch that has been provided for them. Food, the very essence of Singapore! Indeed so concentrated on their food are the fans that many second halfs kick off in absolute silence as spectators negotiate that last piece of fried chicken. |
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