May 20, 2025

I’ve taken a couple of days to rewatch the game – twice. I’ve also taken a couple of days to process not just the final, but the build-up to it, and of course, our amazing journey to even get to this stage. Needless to say, even if it didn’t feel like it at the final whistle, or even now, there was way more to celebrate rather than to cry about. Way more positives than negatives. My post-match interview focused a lot on how lacking Sharjah FC was in sportsmanship, but I promise that for this article, which I hope to come back to in years to come, I will devote only a small section to them, because they are irrelevant and unimportant. We should be proud of what we achieved, on and off the field. Let’s dive right into it. Sh**jah and Their Supposed Superiority The way Sh**jah acted in the build-up to the game, you might have thought that they were a world-class team – the way they demanded for a change of venue, the way their coach was completely ungrateful for all the improvements made to Bishan Stadium. They spoke about “maximum standards” and about how Jalan Besar Stadium wasn’t worthy of hosting a final. Of course, we knew that was just bullshit. They were just afraid of losing on astroturf. And while we expected a game where Sh**jah would try their best to blow us away, what we got was very different. Sh**jah FC did not look like a team that was better than us. If there was one aspect they were better than us at, it was gamesmanship. And so at first when I drafted this article, I went into detail, talking about each incident of bad sportsmanship, talking about how time-wasting when leading may be part of the game, but dropping to feign injuries at 0-0 to halt a counter-attack was definitely a lot more sinister, and a lot more shameful. Especially when you consider the teams’ relative rankings on the world stage. But I realised the article would be way too long – so here goes, I summarised all my thoughts into a poem. An Ode to Sh**jah FC You tried to move the match away,Said Jalan Besar’s not okay.“No astroturf, we want real grass,It’s more comfortable when we dive en masse”. The upgrades came — still you complained,“Not a proper ground,” your coach maintained.Then came matchday, the crowd roared loud,Our Sailors took to the field to do us proud. Your team came with all the reputation,But left us all in pure exasperation.Sailors in a final, that will go down in history,Sharjah? When your players next go down is the only mystery. You held your legs and clutched your knees,A masterclass in cheap theatrics, please.A shove? A scream. A puff? Collapse!Your playbook full of cunning traps. So congratulations Sh**jah, you’ve won the cup,For now I guess I’ll shut the fuck up.But if we ever meet again,It will be you, not us, that feels the pain. An Even Battle Now that we’ve dealt with those irrelevant imbeciles, let’s talk about the match itself. Unexpectedly, it was rather even. I thought that our Sailors would have to be forced into a low block and defend for their lives for the majority of the match, but it wasn’t the case. Just look at the stats at half-time, and at full-time. The stats reflected what we saw – an even game that could have gone either way. Diogo Costa hit the post, Bart and Diogo had efforts cleared right in front of goal, Bart himself missed a glorious chance on his left foot when put through by Song. On their end, they will point to chances for Ousmane Camara from a corner, and a freekick that Izwan did excellently to save to prevent the score from becoming 2-0. Remember of course, that Sharjah came into this as major favourites. The Opta Power Rankings may not be definitive, but it serves as a good guide for the teams’ relative quality. Transfermarkt also lists Sharjah’s team as having 7 times the market value as us. By all measures, we were huge underdogs coming into this. But it sure didn’t seem that way, for more than an hour. You can tell, just from the faces of the Sharjah fans. They were boisterous at kick-off and in the first half, but they grew increasingly frustrated and subdued. I think why there’s such a huge sadness is because of how close we came to winning the ultimate prize. It would have been an amazing way to cap off an amazing ACL2 campaign, and an amazing night. It sounds weird to say this, but had we just fallen to a routine 2-0 loss to a much better team, we could not say that our Sailors didn’t do well this year, but it might not have been as sad. Somehow, the fact that they did so well makes us even more sad. I believe given enough time, these feelings of sadness will fade and be replaced with intense pride in what the team has achieved. The Crowd We Singaporeans can be a very passive crowd sometimes. But given the right circumstances, given the right impetus and people that they believe in, the crowd can be very very boisterous. Just ask any K-Pop stars, or the political parties that held their rallies recently. And so it was no different at Bishan Stadium on Sunday night. On an evening where there was unrelenting rain, and supporters had to sit through a constant drizzle, the crowd still showed up in numbers, and made themselves heard. It is not easy sometimes to make a huge noise when a stadium is open-air, as the sound isn’t contained, but when Maxime hit his equaliser, what a roar that brought! There were flying limbs all around the stadium, people falling over themselves to hold each other in a tight embrace, people fist-pumping so hard you’d think they struck the lottery and