A weekend of football in Bangkok

So here I am after almost 4 days, still with jet lag and a few tasty insect bites and we have done quite a lot since I last blogged including having a cribs style look around Bryan’s Penthouse as well as experiencing my first Saturday night out in Bangkok and no we haven’t been to Patpong…. not yet anyway.

Our night consisted of watching a lot of football all viewed on big screens from the comfort of the official Manchester United bar & restaurant which is definitely more of a classy dining experience than your usual Saturday night down the local.

For Bryan this was the first of what will most certainly be many nights spent here in a private room with plasma screens of any game you could possibly want at your fingertips. This is a country that’s very proud of its national dishes but following on the theme of a true Manchester bar everything is typically English from the menu of burgers & chips (Bryan’s choice) to traditional Old Trafford fish & chips. We even met a good few Mancs enjoying the win over Bolton with torrential rain pouring down outside….just like home.

We woke on Sunday morning and decided to do something relaxing before another days filming began, a traditional Thai massage was the order of the day and it was pretty brutal, my cameraman Ash has bruises and I have a lovely Chinese burn on my wrist so naturally had to go for a swim & Jacuzzi after that.

I’ve been collecting the local papers every day and on the back pages since Bryan’s arrival he’s featured in them all and there’s always news of Manchester United. In the Bangkok Post on Sunday there were six different articles on the back page all reporting on the win over Bolton, absolutely fanatical! Everywhere we’ve been we have seen United shirts, Liverpool seem to be pretty popular too as do Arsenal who’s academy has strong links with Beco Tero Sasana, a team in the Thai Premier League. When we mention we are from Manchester the Thai people only know one team, surprising considering their former prime minister owned City.

After a spot of lunch with Bryan where he was briefed about the national players by Steve Darby his assistant for the national side we headed out for the day to watch more football, this time the Manchester United of Thailand, Muang Thong, who were playing Beco, the Arsenal of the Thai Premier League. Unsurprisingly both sides included Thai national players, it was the last game of the season so Bryan was keen to see some of his players in action before taking them on a training camp to Phuket next week. I mentioned that Muang Thong bore remarkable similarities to Manchester United, this is an understatement! They call themselves MU UTD, their match day programme is also called United Review & has the very same layout, they play in red although the majority of the shirts in the stadium were United ones, they’re the only team to have a club shop (like a mini megastore) and they too are Premier League champions, there was a sell out crowd ( ok15,000 not 75,000 but nearly record breaking for a Thai league game) & the fans never once stopped singing; Glory Glory Man United was translated into Thai & all the chants were mostly Manchester United ones, very surreal.

There are some thing however that couldn’t be further from the Premier League and not just in distance. There’s no such thing as a reserve team, youth team or academy, the reality is that some players simply never get a game, they are just happy to be associated with the team, kick-off takes places just as soon as each side is ready and tickets are the equivalent of £1, at half time refreshments were cakes in little paper boxes with cold flannels to wipe yourself down, not from the cake but the sweat which was literally pouring from us all, lovely!



This was all enjoyed in Muang Thongs stadium the Thunderdome Sport complex which was the biggest difference, the ground is more Macclesfield than Manchester United (No offence to the Moss Rose), there’s no groundsman & the pitch is also the surface that the team train on. The match would most certainly have been called off back home but the players simply got on with the job in hand with the Muang Thong players covered head to toe in mud celebrating at the end a 2-0 win and trophy lift after which there were no signs of flash cars, one of the star players simply strolled out of the ground grabbed a drink from a stall & rode off on his bike! I am not quite sure it was quite what Bryan expected but we (MUTV) got his every reaction to a very different match day experience indeed.