To save your time, this thing is first of all a blog about Singapore football and its name is wordplay surrounding the Kallang Wave. (I use the word “blog” loosely, the format might and should change once I figure out what to do with this with more feedback.) And as I try to explain why I think this blog has a place in the world, I thought of my high school teacher whose English classes I enjoyed. “Lost in the lallang,” she would often say, and she was right.1 That made me think: Singapore football is fun, and funny, and chaotic, and very much lost in the lallang.
Writing this in 2023, there will unfortunately be nothing in this blog that is for the sake of poetry. Just like Singaporean football teams in my childhood, this blog is bumbling and straightforward. There is that small play on the phrase “Kallang Wave”, fine, but I’m not about to wax lyrical about the contours of the lallang and other tropes about its movement in the wind. I’m not good enough with words in that way.
Rather, I think this blog had three ideas in mind: one, this blog is to convince Singaporeans invested in the local football fraternity/scene that they are not crazy for doing so at personal cost. That’s the trade-off of being a fan, isn’t it? Not purely financial costs either – see, there’s Our Tampines Hub; and we don’t even need to find non-legal streams for Hougang-Geyland. But we’ve all sat there looking stupid scrambling for a replay on a mobile livestream even as we’re in the stands ourselves because our stadiums haven’t learnt how to show the replays. So this blog has come alive, just to convince people (it may just be like 7 people) who still follow the Singapore Premier League from a different time zone altogether: it is not that crazy to prefer Tampines-Hougang over Manchester City-Liverpool. Manchester City-Arsenal, that one we can talk ah.
Two, Singapore football is a bit lost – that’s not just because of football results; although that much is true. I’m frankly not sure how many more times we want to postpone new “Goal 20XX” campaigns; but I think there is a big problem when Khairin Nadim wins Goal of the Month and people feel entitled to piss on his ambitions by commenting on social media that he is better off working as a food delivery employee than winning Goal of the Month. Football works in some universal ways: someone will always know someone they knew at St. Gabriel’s Secondary School, or at Hale End, who could play. But in our case, our conclusions are almost like that is all that their wanting amounts to: play, not work. Neither is this blog here to romanticise football performances in terms of fitness or technical quality. Sure, we are all aware of the irony of Singapore football’s loss in stature since the on-paper professionalisation of the country’s top league, but this blog hinges on the assumption that the point of football is never just the winning and the AFF Cups. All that stuff about “far better support for our sportspersons”2 is important, but this blog is a tiny attempt at legitimating discourse and overturning Facebook vitriol one post at a time.
Three, and I think this is happily the starting point – Singapore has its own depth and breadth of independent football culture. Yes, it does in a country with many fans of the English Premier League, of the Brazilian and Argentinian football teams, but not necessarily of football per se. There are some indications of this: our journalists bang on about the inadequacies in SPL broadcasting, our photojournalists ruminate over their own careers on nights where they shutter Son and Hwang in Seoul, and our followers devote time to discuss what a pairing of Kyoga and Ikhsan might look like for the same national team.
On the second day of a new year, fans grapple with the years-long hangover of what the taping-up and permanent closings of street soccer courts mean, and kids take on the void deck and scream “Shahdan Sulaiman” like they heard on TV the night before. Fans debate and introspect about why we have no “culture” like the “culture” in other communities that we see on social media or that self-important voices parrot. Arm- and rattan-chair pundits debate socio-economic factors and imagined “cultural” traits, knowing they are not directly impacting sport administration or even societal attitudes of Singaporeans anytime soon.
Fans continue to pay. They pay for their faith, and they pay even when corporate employees who have stumbled upon free tickets watch literal history in the making. It’s not a stretch to say that Singaporeans can have a fascination with Luton Town notching their first-ever Premier League win at Kenilworth Road. But when they get free corporate tickets to the first-ever Singaporean Asian Champions League victory over Jeonbuk Hyundai, they think “not bad lah, but not many fans though,” almost like they only went because they got free tickets. Moral blame is far from the point, the point is to turn fans of the Premier League into fans of football, and to see that there is such a thing as our football.
These are all things fans acknowledge and work with, often with a significant amount of self-awareness, and it is within these pockets that fans sip iced milo from the mamak at half-time and devour scissors cut curry rice at full-time. So I’m not sure it’s right to say we have no football culture – we have a culture, we’re just grasping for something we can grow increasingly prouder of calling our own.
There is a saying, popularised on the Internet but without any confirmation of who said it first, that football is the most important of the unimportant things. Our football already nuances this and proves this in so many ways – we just have to commit these in writing, matchday upon matchday. Though if it’s the Singapore Cup, that can mean gaps of anything between three days and a month.
We proved nothing about ourselves – we only too often proved her right. Once, in pure exasperation, she did a basic fact-check quiz of the Merchant of Venice, and someone got the character Portia so wrong they had a carmaker down as the answer to the quiz. A bit like if you were required to get “magnesium” as the answer to your science practical exam, only to think throughout the practical that the experiment was about magnets. That works as a completely random and unconnected anecdote, because many things in Singapore football sometimes appear like that.
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