The new ginger in town

The Arsenal Supporters Club is hilarious.

Expectations: a dingy bar containing roughly 18 people – 15 of whom are expats. A few token flags hang from the walls alongside some faded old photos from the ‘98 double winning season. Everyone grumbles about our dismal recent league form while staring gloomily into their pints and talking about how much they hate Emmanuel Eboue.

Reality: upwards of 100 people crammed into a plush room in a plush hotel. Not everyone fits into the room so some stand in the lobby and peer in through the windows, while another 50-odd people watch on another screen out on the terrace. Every available inch of wall space is plastered with pictures, flags and scarves. Virtually everyone is Singaporean. They roar and cheer and boo and hurl abuse with gusto. When we score there’s an absolute riot. It’s the second most raucous response to a goal I have ever seen in a pub (surpassed only by the pub in Paris where I watched the Champions League final with a load of other ticketless Arsenal fans).

Most amusing aspect: the singing. It’s clear that a few people know all the songs pretty well. It’s also clear that the others do not but sing along regardless, mumbling through the words they don’t understand (we’re by far the greyest team the world has ever seen, apparently). Combine this with a wide variety of Chinese and Indian accents and the fact that the women sing louder than the men, and the result sounds like some sort of karaoke session for drunk foreign toddlers. It’s all just brilliantly awkward. And as crowds of boozy football fans go it’s just about as non-threatening as it gets. Even the swearwords sound delightfully inoffensive. There was one Liverpool fan there and he got up and started jumping around like a madman when they scored. This is a situation that invites death in most parts of the world. But not here. Someone started up a chant of “sit down you Scouser” and everyone joined in and had a jolly good laugh about it (incidentally he was about as Scouse as the Dalai Lama).

Undisputed highlight: at half time they turned off the sound and a guy went round with a microphone asking everyone what they thought of the first half and what they thought the final score would be. No joke of a lie.

Revelation of the day: Singaporean slang for a white boy such as myself is ‘ang mo’, which means red hair. My new friend Jim explained that the president of the club is an English guy called Alastair, who they have traditionally taunted with chants of “ang mo, there’s only one ang mo” (Alastair is in fact bald and never had red hair but this is seemingly unimportant). Now that I’ve arrived, chuckled Jim, they’ll have to change the words to “there’s only two ang mos”. Of all the expectations I had of Singapore, I’ll admit that I did not expect to be bullied for being ginger.

Today I ate a chicken’s foot. It was unsatisfying.

I think that’s all for now. Is it really snowing over there? This morning I swam in the pool on the roof of my skyscraper hotel and got a tan after about 15 minutes. In your face England! But then I have no friends so you win some you lose some I suppose.

P.S. if anyone had ever wondered what happened to Joe Royle, Nigel Spackman and / or Paul Walsh – they’re all Premiership pundits on Singaporean TV. Almost makes you wish for David Pleat back.