March 2, 2023

Before every game, we will do a short preview and share some of our thoughts, and also predictions. Starting this season, all 3 of us at SailorFanTalk will give you our predictions, and we will track these over the course of the year. 3 points for exact scoreline predicted correctly, 2 points for predicting the winner and margin of victory correctly (but not the exact scoreline), and 1 point for predicting the outcome correctly (win, lose or draw). If you have been following SPL preview shows, or talking to any ardent SPL fans, you would be sick of hearing this by now – “Brunei DPMM is an unknown quantity”. Heck, even Hafiz Nor said so in his pre-match preview, when he stated that the team “don’t really know what to expect from [DPMM]“. Sick of it or not, it’s because it’s true. We simply do not know what we should expect from them because they have not been in proper competitive action for a very long time. DPMM Brunei’s Absence from “Proper” Competition While Covid-19 ravaged the world, Brunei adopted a very strict stance on international travel, and thus the Singapore Premier League has not seen them since 2020. They played one game then, before the league was suspended. Even when the league resumed, they were unable to travel to Singapore to fulfil their fixtures, so they continued to sit out the remainder of the 2020 season. 2021 saw the same happen – they could not travel here, and thus could not take part in the SPL. However, they did play a handful of games in their Bruneian domestic league before it was suspended again due to Covid-19. 2022 saw them take part in Bruneian domestic competition. Once again, due to Covid-19, the league was abandoned, and thus they only played in the Brunei FA Cup. In this tournament, they recorded crazy scorelines such as 18-0, 8-0, 15-0, and won every game, sweeping all before them on their way to winning the Cup. It is not an understatement to say that this presented little to no challenge for them. It is certainly no replacement for proper competitive football, whatever your thoughts are on the quality of our SPL. It is perhaps also futile if we try to analyse their results from 2019 or 2020 (before Covid-19) to see if we can predict how they will fare later on against us, because it is too long ago. Maybe pre-season would be a better place to look? DPMM Brunei’s Pre-Season From their Instagram page, it seems that Brunei DPMM went to Thailand for pre-season and suffered a couple of defeats. Nothing too surprising or concerning given the quality of the Thai teams. They lost 2-0 to Chonburi FC (Thai T1 team), and 3-0 to Nakhonpathum United (Thai T2 team). They then went back to Brunei and beat a local team 3-0. There is perhaps not a lot you can glean from these results given that we have no idea who played for Chonburi or Nakhonpathum United. If those Thai teams played their full teams with their first-teamers (unlikely), then DPMM is probably going to ruffle a few feathers in the SPL this season. The SPL teams did not have a good time when they went abroad, so if you do some back-of-the-napkin calculations and deductions, DPMM not getting thrashed means they are better than our teams. (Yes, we are desperate to try to get some conclusions out of the little nuggets of information we have). Andrey Varankow How can we do a DPMM preview piece without talking about Andrey Varankow? In the picture you see Varankow (or Voronkov, there are so many spellings it’s insane), with the other 3 foreigners who are part of DPMM’s squad this season. Varankow scored 23 goals in 24 appearances the last time he played a full season in Singapore. Yes, those are stats you see in FIFA or Football Manager. Unsurprisingly, he finished as top-scorer by some margin, and DPMM won the league. Whenever he played, he was a constant threat, and Singaporean defences just did not manage to get a handle on him. However, and this is the big “however” – that was 4 years ago, when Varankow was 30. He is now 34. And it’s not just the age. He was out of contract in 2022, which means he did not even play in DPMM Brunei’s successful FA Cup campaign. His last football action was in the shortened Brunei Super League campaign in 2021, where he scored 23 goals in 6 games – once again highlighting the point that playing domestically in Brunei really isn’t competitive at all. He may struggle to find his feet in the league, and that’s certainly what we LCS fans will be hoping for later today. A quick side-note on the other foreigners – they all come with pretty good pedigree, having played in leagues such as the Greek Superleague and the Uzbek league. However, I will not pretend to know more about these players. We will just have to see how good they are for ourselves. Conclusion Given that DPMM are a bit of an unknown quantity and the bulk of their team is made up of the Brunei national team, who did not look great at the AFF ME Cup a few months back, and then factoring in their lack of practice in a competitive sense, we see the Sailors edging this one. Score Prediction As mentioned above, this will be a continuing feature as the season goes on. Joseph, Ethan, and myself will predict the scores, and track our success in a table. Stay tuned to find out who is the prediction king! 3 points for exact scoreline predicted correctly, 2 points for predicting the winner and margin of victory correctly (but not the exact scoreline), and 1 point for predicting the outcome correctly (win, lose or draw). Eddy’s prediction: 3-1 Sailors Ethan’s prediction: 2-1 Sailors Joseph’s prediction: 2-2 Draw Written by Eddy Hirono [UPDATE]: