"They Simply Just Don't Bother Us"

By: Ko Po Hui
Special to Soccer City FC

Up to today I still have friends, colleagues come up to me and lamented,"Why isn't there any local football news on the paper?"

I'm not sure if scenario like this occurred in other places as well, but as a matter of fact Singaporeans football fans does have this problem – they don't seems get enough information from where they supposed to – the mainstream media.

Save for the occasionally mouth-watering events such as the bi-annual Asean Football Federation (AFF) championship for the South East Asian nations, there's hardly any media coverage on Singapore soccer.

Therefore, it was no wonder why the local sporting media suddenly upped their work rate for the past few days when the Brazilian Olympics soccer team landed on the shores of this tiny island republic for their acclimatised training.

Suddenly, you saw pages of news devoted to the Samba boys on the back pages as newspapers compete to outwit each other to get the bits and pieces of whatever surrounding Ronaldinho, Anderson etc.

I guess the sad fact of this happening boils down to the fact that it's more of profit-driven rather than duty-driven to sell the papers nowadays.

Stern from the fact that during heydays of the Malaysia Cup era, it's a common thing to see fans alike crowded around a copy of “The New Paper” (a local afternoon tabloid prided itself as a football paper) and chat over any issues pertaining the Singapore team playing in the Malaysia Cup tournament.

However, since the pullout from the mass-appealing Malaysia Cup tournament back in 1994, the mainstream media coverage of local soccer had since dwindle as day passes by, while the papers have to look for something to fill up the pages to retain the readership.

And you guessed it – the ever-popular English Premier League (EPL).

With their slick packaging and aggressive marketing around the globe, it is a common sight to fans around this region don the jerseys of Arsenal, Liverpool and other Europeans mega clubs walking proudly around their neighbourhoods.

As mentioned earlier, since it's a trend of being market-driven rather than being duty-bound to cover the local soccer scene in Singapore, it's not uncommon to see mainstream merely scribbled a few lines on some obscured spots on the sport pages detailed just scores and relevant stats on the previous night local league's fixtures.

The main focus would be on the EPL with some local journalists fit themselves in as if they are respected columnists Alan Hansen or Rob Hughes giving opinions on the matches several timezones away from theirs, while almost completely ignored those happening at their own backyards.

So much so that sometimes I can't blame some of my friends or colleagues having that kind of negative impression of the local league (the S.League), which in recent years do their fair share of troubles such as a few cases of match-fixing since its inception in 1996.

As negative stuff helped to boast the readership, it was a sad fact that happened in the aftermath after the recent heavy defeat to the Asian powerhouse Uzbekistan in the World Cup qualifiers that these mainstream media mercilessly panned the performance of the Singapore national team, who were for the first time in their history made it to this stage of the campaign.

Fairly enough to say that the Singapore team were not at their best against the Uzbeks but the heart-wrenching part was the fact the prior commendable performances of the Lions (the team's moniker) were completely erased after that 7-3 defeat on the 2nd June 2008.

Although we are now living in a wired world of the internet, text messages, YOUTUBE and other online media that transcend boundaries of nations, a stark hard fact is that the mainstream media, which comprise the newspapers, radio and television, still play an important role to reach out to the masses, especially those who can't have access to the cyberspace at their fingertips all the time.

Unless, the mindset of those sports editors can be tweaked and a real tangible solution can be found through other means to reach out to the fans, I really fear one day that I might not even know who are the players play for the national team.

(P.S: one of the aims of the contributor's blog is hope to raise the awareness of the S.League – Singapore's own professional soccer league)

Ko Po Hui operates BoLASEPaKO.