BANGKOK – Thailand-based fans of English football inaugurated the new Barclays Premier League Whinging Season this weekend with a loud and haughty series of opening-day activities. Despite much of the world’s sporting attention being focused on the Beijing Olympics, Bangkok’s dedicated professional whingers faithfully put on their kit and began in earnest the new season of their favorite sport: complaining about everything their small, lager-impaired minds can think of.
“I couldn’t find the goddamned Community Shield on bloody ESPN,” shouted Neil Blethyn, a dive instructor from South London, referring to the traditional season-opening football game which has neither consequence nor offers a trophy any team cares about. “I had to call UBC and yell at the bitch for ten minutes before she managed to tell me that it was on something called Channel 5, which I never heard of,” he went on, apparently unaware that UBC Cable changed its name to TRUE three years ago and that Channel 5 is a free Thai TV station.
His inability to find the game on TV, which would have been solved by a ten-second glance in the sports section of either the Bangkok Post or The Nation, both of which he reads daily for free at Starbucks Coffee, constituted grounds for writing an angry letter to both newspapers attacking the “incompetence” of “UBC’s monopoly” for “refusing to show the game,” apparently unaware that the Community Shield is sold by the Premier League separately and that the Thai broadcast rights were won by TV Pool, an entity Blethyn does not even know exists despite living in Thailand since 1997.
Those who managed to find the game managed to conjure up more grounds for sporty compliant-making, specifically the lack of English commentators on Thai TV, which reaches a 99.4% Thai-speaking audience. “Who the fuck are these clowns?” demanded Ken Randleman, an English teacher from Newcastle, referring to the yellow-shirt-wearing Channel 5 commentators at half-time. “And why can’t I get English commentary during? I pushed the button for English and I still get Thai,” he went on, unaware that second audio programming was a technological feature of cable-based regional programming streams, not regular Thai television. “Thing must be broken.”
Within two days of the game no fewer than 47 angry, grammatically incomprehensible letters had been sent to Bangkok’s two English dailies, shattering the Premier League record set by the 2006-07 season but still short of the all-time 48-hour whinging record set during the first two days of the 2006 Fifa World Cup, when 632 letters were received espousing wide-ranging ignorance of Fifa’s system of broadcasting rights, Thailand’s cultural priority on reporting the 60th Anniversary celebrations of the King’s reign, and the fact that Thai people don’t all speak English yet.
Observers are optimistic that this season, while not delivering the concentrated whinge of a World Cup, should still set records for thick-headed observation and moronic self-righteousness. “TRUE still hasn’t managed to resolve the issue of bringing back English language half-time shows,” noted Pichit Wongthanoen, a media researcher and Sunderland supporter. “The sight of three Asian people commentating at halftime of every live game will never fail to ignite the most base, racist, imperialist urges of the average expat footy fan. I think we can expect a 20% average gain in letters and screen-directed, expletive-laden comments at the city’s Irish pubs.”
“Plus,” he added. “They’re still making us watch Nokia’s Football Crazy. That even makes me pissed off.”
