BoLASEPaKO.COM - A Blog on Singapore Football

A year ago... 16th January 2005.. How times really flies. Exactly, a year ago today at this time of writing, we were celebrating as the national team, led by coach Raddy, triumphed over the much-fancied Indonesians to lift the Tiger Cup in front of the 55,000 fans. Still remember that day, I met up with my colleagues at the Kallang MRT station and made our way together with the rest of the red-shirted supporters (pictured on the left)with a similar aim - to revive the Kallang Roar. And we did The moment when Indra Sahdan scored the first goal of the game, the whole Kallang if not the whole Singapore erupted. Such a feeling and glad l was there to witness all these happend right in front of me. (Pictured above right: me - in shades with my colleagues in the stadium that night)

The First Training session for the Lions in 2006 It's been raining for the past three days and when was made know that the national team will be conducting their first centralised training on this day (which is Hari Raya Haji), I was wondering if the session is going on. So off l went to the Jalan Besar stadium at close to 6pm. And here l was at the home of Singapore football, where the first training session of the year was conducted. Should have this been a year ago, nobody would dare to risk their life to train on the pitch which had since made way to the newly-laid artificial pitch. Likes of Tampines's Mustafic Fahrudin and Bah Mamadou of Home Utd were at the training session for the first time since their naturalization. While the likes of Ashrin Shariff and Shi Jia Yi were doing their light training. Some fine touches were shown during the training session, though it's still early to say if the team are rwady for the challenge ahead.

ARROGANT DANES I was not surprised when the Danish decided to field their second-stringer in the upcoming friendly against the Lions. What really disgusted me is the manner the Danish treated the whole event. Call it a way of "belittle" your host, the Danish FA (DBU) in their reply to a local paper, that they don't regard this FIFA "A" fixture as such. Such an arrogant reply really made us wonder if it's worth while in the first place to agree to a sparring match.(as it was the Danes, through their agent, approached the FAS in the first place.)

First post of the Year 2006 Managed to tap on to a wi-fi network while waiting for the dreaded flight home. At least the news that I gathered that Radojko Avramovic had extended his contract as the Lions Coach for another two years, brought some cheers in my final moments in Incheon Airport (pictured below), Seoul. Despite the SEA Games flop that still etched in many's mind, it is still felt that Raddy is the right person to push the team to the next level. In the past, number of national coaches had been blasted for sticking to the "same old, few faces" in numbers of crucial games. Although faced with sceptism, the Serb-Montenegrin fielded a large numbers of youngsters. In a gamble that paid off handsomely in last year's Tiger Cup victory. Thus I would say any disruption in this transitional period will proved fatal if Raddy decided to leave as his successor would either had to follow up from where he left or rebuild another development program from...