ASEAN CHAMPIONSHIPS FINAL FIRST LEG

Singapore 2 Thailand 1

The Internet is being slow this morning. Very frustrating when you're trying to be quick before going to work.

Anyway, Liana and Armando (some Swiss-German guy) decided to join us as well. It's Armando's first time watching a soccer match here and I reckon he, in fact all 55,000 of us got more than we bargained for.

A little trivia on this whole ASEAN CHAMPIONSHIPS thingy. It was formed 12 years ago between all member nations of the Association of South East Asian Nations to take soccer to another level as well to foster better ties between us.

Fast forward 12 years later, it's now been reduced to nothing but an utter farce.

For instance, Brunei, one of the founding members isn't in this year's tournament for reasons unknown even though they've got an extremely rich king. Even The Philippines and Laos, the tournament's traditional whipping boys make a point to take part.

Timor Leste, the newest country in this part of the world isn't in the tournament. Perhaps they couldn't raise the necessary funds. All I know is they cannot use political strife as an excuse since Iraq and Palestine are still playing soccer on the world stage and they've got more on their plate than most countries on Earth.

Politically-speaking, this year's tournament was supposed to commemmorate the anniversary of the formation of ASEAN and we couldn't ask for a worse final match up than between the current one - Singapore versus Thailand.

Why? Because of late the relationship between both our countries has been straining. It all started when last year, their then PM Thaksin Shinawatra sold his telecoms company to our state-owned Temasek Holdings.

The Thai people got paranoid. I don't wanna bore you with the details but let's just say it got so bad that there was a political upheaval in Thailand and the result is now their country is governed by military people. Scary smelly brown stuff.

And last night at the soccer match, it got worse.

From the first whistle to the last the Thai soccer team showed nothing but unsporting behaviour. Wrestling with our players, diving and feigning injury in order to upset our team's rhythm and get our players yellow-carded and that's still not too bad.

Yeah, because like the little girls that they are, no offence to little girls, they suddenly decided not to play in the 83rd minute and walked off the pitch towards their team bench in protest of the penalty call the referee made on a foul on Noh Alam Shah.

I've actually got video footage of this but I think the file's too big or something so I can't post it on here. They simply just refuse to continue play. Disgraceful behaviour from people who hail from the Land of Smiles.

Really unbecoming bringing The Beautiful Game into disrepute like that. I don't know if the referee made a bad call or whatever (not that I would protest) but sometimes decisions don't go our way. It's part of the game's excitement. The Socceroos lost in the last World Cup when Fabio Grosso of Italy dived in the box to earn his team a penalty but you don't see their players storming off the pitch like spoiled brats.

There are rules and regulations for this type of thing. Play did resume after about 15 minutes. Our Mustafic Fahrudin blasted the ball into their net at the spotkick and we held on with the score at 2-1 for about ten more minutes before the match officially ended.

It's not over for Thailand though. I'm sure they would be heavily punished by the AFC if not also by FIFA for their outburst of petulance.

For now, all we need to do is to park a bus in front of our goalpost in the return leg in Bangkok this Sunday.