July 19, 2024

Once again, Chin Heng takes over the writing of this article, and he lends his unique statistical analytical mind to the page. Enjoy! I am kinda glad I don’t have to comment on this trainwreck of a game. I could save myself a few minutes by copying-and-pasting some paragraphs from the last few Post-Match articles because we once again witnessed a Sailors performance that left much to be desired, except this time we were up against a team that actually had the quality to punish us. This was set to be a very close encounter on paper, with Sailors and Tampines having identical records on multiple fronts coming into the game – both teams had 6 wins and a draw (beating every other team in the league except Geylang), and had scored 24 goals (8 in the 1st half, 16 in the 2nd half, 3 set piece goals). However, the final score was anything but close. It was a disastrous performance by the Sailors but as they say, you can only beat what’s in front of you, Tampines still had to do their part and the result was a resounding 5-0 victory in Gavin Lee’s first ever win against coach Rankovic. Tampines were the better team and deserved the win for sure, but I felt that they were definitely not better by 5 goals. Be Careful What You Wish For Coach Rankovic mentioned during the pre-match interview that he hoped the referee would ‘let things go and let the game flow’, and he got what he wished for in the 3rd minute when Boris Kopitovic left his trailing foot in a challenge with Zharfan, resulting in his heel striking Zharfan on the face. The referee didn’t even give a card initially, but after a VAR review, settled on a yellow card to Kopitovic. In my opinion, this was clearly a deliberate action by Kopitovic to leave his foot in, either in an attempt to earn his 97th penalty of the season or to leave a hole in Zharfan’s face. However, since he didn’t achieve either goal, I agree there wasn’t quite enough in it to warrant a red. It’s a close one though, and I suspect that if the referee had given a red initially, the VAR would not have overturned the decision either. Nevertheless, I’d like to state that this is not an excuse for our loss. Red or no red doesn’t seem to matter when you put in such a bad performance. On that note, we can’t help but wonder if the Sailors could have made a difference to the result by engaging in similar tactics to stamp our authority on the game, going a little harder into each challenge, or leaving a foot in here and there, just to show the other team that we are there. There’s no right answer to this of course, a mistimed attempt could easily leave us playing the rest of the game with 10-men as well. There’s just something about watching the other team pass pretty patterns around but us not doing much to leave our mark on them. Change in Formation The Sailors lined up with 5 at the back this game, after making 4 changes from the win against Balestier, with Anu, Hafiz, Lionel, and Shawal coming in for Adam Swandi, Chris, Hami, and Song. For the first 40 mins, this all seemed to work as each of the 3 centre backs were winning their individual battles, putting in important blocks and tackles to contain the variety of attacking threats coming from Boris Kopitovic, Seia Kunori, Faris Ramli, and Glenn Kweh. Then came the disaster in a span of 10 or so minutes either side of half-time. Tampines scored 2 goals in quick succession at the stroke of half-time, first from Boris Kopitovic after a well-timed run to beat the offside trap, followed by a Glenn Kweh tap-in after Zharfan inexplicably spilled the ball on the goal-line, straight onto Glenn’s foot. Changes were made at half-time as we switched to 4 at the back with Song coming in for Lionel to chase the game, but seemed to have no effect as 3 more quick goals by the 55th minute left the Sailors shell shocked. Glenn Kweh beat Sergio a little too easily down the right on the 47th minute before squaring the ball for Kopitovic to finish, then former Sailor Faris Ramli received the ball wide on the left and cut in to finish into the bottom corner on 49, before Irfan Najeeb wrapped up the game through an open header from a corner kick on 55. There is an argument to be made that all 5 goals were down to our mistakes, something that I am sure the team will examine closely back on the training ground. Positives You would have to dig very hard to find positives from a 5-0 loss, but I think there may still be a silver lining or two to be found. There has been some criticism directed at Song in recent weeks as he did not seem to be performing at the same levels as he did before he left in 2023, but in this game we saw glimpses of the old Song. It may have been due to the scoreline, but he appeared to be fired up, ready to take on defenders and chase loose balls like he used to. Not quite where he wants to be I’m sure, but a commendable effort nonetheless. We also saw Rui Pires coming back from injury to finally make his SPL debut, after playing exclusively in the ACL last season due to the foreigner restrictions in the league. As Eddy mentioned in his preview article, we once again showed a lack of willingness to play the ball through midfield in this game, restricting our options when going forward, but the introduction of Rui did seem to help a little on this front as he showed some effort to orchestrate the play in midfield