February 2025

A couple of months ago, this would have been a walk in the park. TPUFC was losing game after game, conceding tons of goals while scoring barely any. Now though, they look a different team with some new faces, and also the return of a familiar face in Noh Alam Shah. They’re still bottom of the table, but is there some cause for concern? Let’s do a quick preview while I am still in Manila. Form since NAS Came Back Since Noh Alam Shah’s return, TPUFC have played three matches, achieving a win, a loss, and a draw. That is quite remarkable considering that prior to his return, they were on a run of 6 losses, and their last win was in July 2024. Yikes. However, since his return, by all accounts, he has worked the players insanely hard. I assume that means both fitness-wise and also defensively, because they now seem a much more solid outfit. Of the 3 games, the 3-0 win against DPMM stands out as the most impressive, because for a team that has conceded 74 goals this season, keeping a clean sheet is not easy. Scoring 3 goals isn’t easy as well, of course. He did an interview with the Straits Times and he had this to say – Ouch. Yeah he means business. Their match against Young Lions was an even one, and ended with a deserved draw, but prior to that NAS’s return, most people would have predicted Young Lions to triumph over them. In the 3 matches played, a key factor that has aided NAS is that Salif Cisse is back fit and firing. He has scored twice and also picked up a brilliant assist for Syahadat Masnawi. During their terrible run, Salif Cisse was often not available. He has only made 12 appearances in the league so far, out of a possible 21 games. Now that he’s back, TPUFC’s attack finally has a focal point, and they always look to launch it quick in defence up to him because he is capable of creating his own chances. If we keep him quiet, it would go a long way to getting that victory for us. Terrible Defence The difficulty with this preview of course is wondering whether NAS’s impact is big enough to change what we’ve seen with this team in the first half of the season. As mentioned earlier, they have by far the worst defensive record in the league, conceding 74 goals in 21 games. A -51 goal difference looks bad no matter how you slice it. A lot of that is due to poor organisation. Matt Silva has come in and already shown that he is a better communicator with the backline than the other goalies that TPU used this season. However, I don’t think one man can work wonders. Another unique stat for you is that TPUFC have conceded the most penalties this season, 8. 5 of those were from handballs, and the other 3 from mistimed tackles. What does that stat tell you? Maybe nothing. It could simply be that as a defensive team, they sit a lot in their own box, so given they spend so much time there, they are more likely to concede penalties. It could also be an indicator that they tend to panic a lot, and make bad decisions. However you look at it, I think our Sailors will be disappointed if they don’t cause a lot of trouble for Tanjong Pagar here. Rotation With the huge tie against Muangthong coming up, rotation will definitely enter the mind of Coach Ranko. How will he shuffle the pack? Diogo Costa didn’t play in the Shopee Cup, so he might come in for this one. Lionel did not even travel with the team to Manila – is he injured? Noone knows. Shawal did not even see a minute against Kaya FC, even when we were going for goals. Could Bill have played himself into the reckoning of the coaches, at least to start games in the league, if not in the ACL2? I suspect that the lineup will not be super-weak, given that any slip-up here will mean that our Sailors head into Thailand off the back of 2 bad results. Conclusion I think no matter how resurgent TPUFC are, we have to win this. Ultimately, this is largely still the same set of players that have struggled this season – except we went ahead and took their captain. For the sake of wrapping up the league, for the sake of entering the Muangthong game with a bit of spring in our step, we have to win this. COME ON YOU BOYS IN BLUE My predicted line-up Zharfan Rohaizad Hami Syahin, Lionel Tan, Bailey Wright, Toni Datkovic, Sergio Carmona Hariss Harun, Anumanthan Kumar Lennart Thy, Abdul Rasaq, Bart Ramselaar Score Prediction Joseph and I 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: Sailors 3 TPUFC 0 Joseph’s prediction: Sailors 3 TPUFC 1 Written by Eddy Hirono If you’d like to support the work we do here at SailorFanTalk, you may want to visit https://ko-fi.com/sailorfantalk and leave us a tip! Picture credit – TPUFC Facebook

Good morning to you from bright, sunny Manila. I just got back to the hotel room a few hours ago from a bar with a live band and my oh my, the stereotypes are true, all Filipinos can sing. Two bands came on stage, and both absolutely blew us away. What blew us away even more was the fact that one of the “singers” in the first band wasn’t a band member at all, and he was just a local MP who happened to be in the area, and they got him up on stage to sing with them. If anyone knows who he is, give us a shout. Imagine that, you’re in Singapore listening to your favourite band at a bar, and suddenly Josephine Teo or Ong Ye Kung comes on stage to belt out hit after hit after hit. Our Filipino guest singer didn’t just do one or two songs, he did a 45min non-stop medley with the rest of the band, starting us off with a Backstreet Boys megamix and eventually culminating with some 70s disco hits like “September”, “Dancing Queen”, and “Let’s Groove Tonight”. What a blast it was. If you think that we look incredibly relaxed, it’s partly the alcohol, but partly also because tonight’s game is a dead rubber. We’re fighting for pride and that’s it. Let’s dive right into the preview. Kaya Cannot Overtake Us No matter what happens tonight, Kaya cannot overtake us. Even if we lose, they’ll be on 3 points and we stay at 4. However, I still hope the team takes it seriously. The last time we had a dead rubber in a continental game, that was against Kitchee in last season’s ACL, and honestly, that was a performance to forget. The players looked like they wanted to be on the beaches already, and there was no intensity, no fire. We can do much better than that. I’ve mentioned before that winning is a habit, and short of sending out your U21 team, any sort of loss will not be easy to compartmentalise for the senior squad. A win also further sends a message to the rest of the league and the continent, that Lion City Sailors is a force to be reckoned with. This reputation and fear factor that it comes with can be crucial as we look ahead to Muangthong. Now of course, given our packed schedule, I am not saying we should not rotate. From now till 2 March, we play 8 games, meaning that we only have 3-4 days to recover for each game. You definitely cannot get through such a schedule without giving some players rest. It’s whether we can do that and still put out each time, a team capable of winning the game. Auditioning for Starts in Bigger Games Football can be a funny old game sometimes. To say the back-end of 2024 was not a great time for Anu would be an understatement. Provisionally called up to the national team, then not deemed to be good enough for the final squad, getting very few minutes for the Sailors, and when he did, getting sent off – I didn’t see a way back for Anu to be honest. I assumed that his Sailors career would wind down, and he’d eventually join another club when the season ends. It felt sad but inevitable. Then there were rumours in January that TPUFC had agreed with LCS on a loan move for Anu, and I thought OK, it would be a good move for Anu. He gets some gametime to hopefully re-ignite his case for a National Team position, but I did say it would leave us a bit short given the number of competitions we were in. Lo and behold, Rui Pires then gets injured against DPMM, and Anu takes his place. An assured performance then leads to him starting against Albirex. Yet another assured performance later, starts for Buriram and then Geylang come. I can’t be arsed to go fetch the stats, but 3 starts in a row for Anu must be pretty rare in the last year and a half. And it’s not like Coach Ranko didn’t have options. He could have started Hariss there, he could have played another fullback against Buriram so that Hami can take Anu’s place in midfield. This is a show of confidence in Anu’s abilities by Coach Ranko, and I couldn’t be more pleased to see it. If anything, this should serve as a timely reminder to the rest of the squad that their time in the Sailors is not over until it’s truly over. For those finding minutes hard to come by, the coach can be convinced to allow a second chance – but the performances must come. Could tonight see people like Rasaq, Akram Azman, Haiqal Pashia and the like force their way into Coach Ranko’s thinking? No Dangermen for Kaya FC I can’t pretend to know much about the “dangermen” for Kaya FC. No matter how I watch them, there seem to be no dangermen. I am not even kidding. There’s the Kaishu-returning-to-take-revenge angle, but beyond that, I think the only threat to our team is complacency and/or a lack of desire. I mean, this is a team that made league goalscorer Tomoyuki Doi look completely ineffective in the last game, so I am not sure anyone from Kaya will trouble us. You can read the official club piece which tries to outline where the danger may come from, but it only served to reinforce my opinion – it depends on what kind of team we put out, and what kind of effort we want to expend on the pitch tonight. Conclusion There will be some rotation, but who comes in, that is the question. Mamat made his comeback to U21 action on Monday, but this game is perhaps a little too soon for him in his recovery process. Will the coaching team (minus Coach Ranko who hasn’t travelled cos he is