July 19,
2004
From current top dogs Home United to
barely alive Woodlands
Just 6 points separate top spot from
fifth with 9 games to go in the season.
Every coaches is confident they would
be in the mix come September when the season end but almost all the other 4
coaches believed Home United are favourite as they
have the best squad of the league.
Despite
admitting Home United are better, Stags coach Vorawan
Chitavanich, whose team Tampines
Rovers are in second position, is bullish about their chances as his team like
Home United have a good mix of experienced & young players.
He felt it is the best mix as experience
alone is not enough as the older players need to show heart to fight & that
is where the young ones come in but it is 2 way as the young ones have also benefited from
listening to the advice of the older players.
One team with lacking the experienced
players would be third placed Young Lions making the
Young Lions the darkhorses among the 5 contenders.
To counter that coach Kim Poulsen is banking on the old gambit of keeping the team
focused on the next match and not to look too far ahead.
The Dane is not thinking about the
title at the moment because he know the best way to go about things is to focus
on each match as it comes as there is the danger of
losing focus if they start thinking about which position they will be in if they
win or lose a game.
Also in his eye it would be hard for
his team to overtake Home United as they are top & have the players with
the experience to do win the title.
The title is there for the taking with
all in with a chance, according to SAFFC coach Jimmy Shoulder, whose team are
in fourth spot.
It is still wide open & he would
not put money on any side at the moment as having seems everything in his coaching
career he believed there are still points to be dropped over the next 9 games
for all the top 5 teams. After all few would expect
that Home United to lose to Balestier Khalsa & Albirex Niigata,
after all the hype, would be mid-table.
The team with the least chance should
be Woodlands
Not to Simon Clark as he still
believed his team have as good a chance as any of the other top 4 teams to take
S-League gold as anything is possible & will continue to think so until it
is mathematically impossible.
It looked like a fight until the
season end in September