Bangkok Weekend Trip, Chelsea v Thai All Stars. Isaan Style.

The other weekend I travelled to Bangkok with a mate to watch Chelsea Football Club play a Thailand Premier League All Star team. I do not support Chelsea, I support Newcastle in the English Premier League, any sport across the world I support the team that is black and white the same color as my beloved Collingwood Football Club in the Australian Football League in Australia.

The other guy I went with, who I call big brother (BB) or “Horse” used to support Manchester United but now he doesn’t really follow anyone but has travelled the world watching football. The other mate who was meant to come and is a lifelong Chelsea supporter, I mean he went to games before I was born. He become unwell and could not travel with us.

So I and BB headed off to the concrete jungle on Friday evening on the Nakhonchai Air first class bus, and for 736 baht it is unbelievably cheap. It is the only bus service I will travel on if not flying. We left Ubon Ratchathani at 10.15pm and arrived in Bangkok just after 6am. I watched a few movies on my little screen and played a few games and then slept in a very comfortable chair that goes well back and has a massager built in that I utilized well.

We arrived at our hotel, had breakfast and then went and had a sleep for a couple of hours, well BB had a sleep as he is a little older than me and also he couldn’t sleep as there was a Thai guy just across from him that snored most of the trip, I luckily had my iphone and had music playing quietly through my earphones.

So I watched some AFL action and then we set off to Rajamangala National Stadium to pick up our tickets around 1pm. The taxi driver was heading the right way and then turned into Ramkhamhaeng University which is huge. And after driving about for a bit and then stopping to ask a few people how to get to the stadium, we exited the taxi and walked.


The stadium is big, it holds 65,000 people, and I was looking forward to the atmosphere of a live crowd again. The weather was overcast as per usual this time of the year. I usually don’t Photoshop most pictures I put on this blog, I do Photoshop many pictures that I think are special and I want for keepsakes or if I am taking pictures for someone. They are touched up and then backed up to external disks. Otherwise most are just uploaded as are. The above pictures I added the blue sky as the cloudy sky made them look drab.


To edit the above photo as you see it took maybe two minutes at the most. I was going to leave the white cloudy sky but I know my mate wants a few pics so I edited them, quickly and I will try and show you some pictures later on this week or so that have had major work done, a bit like what they do on magazine covers.


Above the blue sky is added and the seats colours darkened and the grass made a little more lush as well, in all lest than 5 minutes to do. This was a guy we had a good chat to and he was testing the sound system out so I gave him a hand and sang the Australian National Anthem, not!


Above BB was posing for another national stadium visited in another country.


The scoreboard that would go on and read Chelsea 4 – 0 TPL All Stars, the game itself was okay, but the atmosphere I was expecting wasn’t really there and the non stop, “bom, bom, bom” of a drum that was meant to get the crowd clapping along, I and many other foreigners wanted to find the drummer and stick his sticks right up his…, you know where.

BB had sat on this bench for a picture and it happened to be where Chelsea sat, he was pretty chuffed knowing this that players like Lampard and Terry who get in excess of £200,000 a week were sitting on his seat.

It was disorganized getting into the ground on the evening, kick off was 5.45pm and there were 10,000 plus people outside playing games around sponsor tents winning crap little prizes. We arrived at 5.20pm and made our way through 3 security checks where we were patted down each time.

We arrived at our entry gate and there was a single line going through a single gate, there were security guards again patting people down and also checking bags again. The single file line stretched way back, we walked a good 500mtrs and it kept going out of sight.

We eventually came across another entry gate and a line of people stretching miles back, we pushed through our line and went up to one of the guards and asked, “Can we get in this gate with this ticket?” after she looked it over she replied, “yes” and we were in. We pushed in, in front of thousands of others that were going to be stuck in lines for at least a good 30 minutes. An absolute fuc# up by the Thai Football Association. More gates open next time and maybe 4 security checks just a little over kill.

Anyway, on the Saturday after we tried to pick up our tickets we went in search of a beer. We walked and walked, down alleys, along small laneways but could not find anything. I then asked a guy in a shop where we could get a beer.

He replied, “No beer, this is Islam area.” So that is why I saw so many women wearing hijabs. Anyway we didn’t give up and we ended up walking down some tiny little paths and what looked like at times the backs of people houses or shops to which they got a good laugh seeing two farangs in search of beer.

We passed a laneway and as I glanced down I saw a sign with “snooker” written on it, we headed there, up a flight of stairs and inside was cool air-conditioning and most importantly a fridge full of very cool beer. So we sat down for a couple of ales planning our night ahead that turned out to be a classic.

It involved many beers and a trip to the infamous Soi 4, in Nana district. And that blog will be coming another day, hopefully soon.

Brunty