Rome is not built in one day, Roman

Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea is becoming a running joke in the football scene, with the latest sacking of Roberto Di Matteo. What does he actually think in his mind, nobody will ever know. Big name coaches like Felipe Scholari, Carlo Ancelotti and Jose Mourinho had all faced the exit door unwillingly. Even winning the ultimate prize of the Champions League, Di Mateo was also being shown the door. So what do Roman actually wants? If football is just a system of pressing a button for results in an ideal situation, then Roman would have been the god of the football industry. 

F1 Finale: Vettel vs Alonso

Things sure look interesting this weekend for the Brazilian F1 GP race at the Interlagos circuit. Sebastien Vettel is leading the championship by 13 points over Fernando Alonso. With the reliability and speed of his Red Bull, finishing ahead of Alonso should be a certainty and being crowned the youngest triple World Champion. However, unpredictability always plays a significant role in F1. Remember how Kimi Raikonnen won his world crown in 2007 at Ferrari at the last race, despite being the heavy underdog going into the last round of the championships, and Lewis Hamilton winning his world title practically at the last corner of the race to usurp Felipe Massa in the 2008 overall standings, and becoming the youngest world champion. Even while Jenson Button was with Brawn GP and having the fastest and most reliable car in 2009, he could only finished in the midpoints, being unable to overtake Kamui Kobayashi for most part of the race, ensuring the minimum points that was needed to crown him a world champion. 

S League Players' Musical Chairs

It’s the time of the year yet again where you see the S League players play a few rounds of musical chairs with different clubs, which means the local transfer season. Good players will be poached, while luckier players may just get enough chance to stay in the game to be called professional players. Unluckier players probably will just have to hang up their boots and "retire", whom they may be only in the mid-twenties or younger.

It is actually quite a sad case looking at the S League transfer market although the product has been around for so many years. From my personal perspective, football is a profession which is the same as white collar jobs. However, plying their trade in S League would not give them enough job security. Most of the players are basically on short term contracts of about 2 years, and what happens after that depends heavily on a few factors:

                  1.       Their skills

                  2.       Wage demands

                  3.       Clubs’ budget

Save Our S League

So the 2012 S League season has finished with the culmination of the awards ceremony, where deserving winners getting the accolades. It has been a dramatic year of football for the Singapore scene. With the Lions XII participating in the Malaysia Cup, the kind of atmosphere last seen in Kallang, was being brought back many times during the season. Tears of joy and disappointment, elation and frustration at the tactical play, seemed to bring the Singaporeans back to the glory days of us cheering as one. If the national team, which is mainly made up of Lions XII players, goes on to achieve respectable success at the Suzuki Cup, and then this project can be considered a success.