Chupacabras Resolved
Tian In Groove
After Tampines Phoenix F.C.'s no-show on Monday,
Niculae Stanca decided to give his first team a rare friendly runout, and they obligingly reversed the club's losing run with a commanding 9-0 win over Slovakian visitors Chupacabras Sučany. Interestingly, Chupacabras are the first club from that country to visit The Cooking Pot, despite Grilled having visited Slovakia six times, four times in Season 41 alone.
Nearly 4900 got tickets after the last-minute announcement that regular talent would be on show, and they were soon plied with goals. The Birds spent 19 minutes to take the measure of Chupacabras before upping the ante, and
Tian Yonghang opened the scoring with a delightful chip over Mikko Kivelä.
Tian's hat-trick took only seven more minutes in arriving, as the visiting players began to fall by the wayside to the first team's rapid interpassing, the effectiveness of which was multiplied by timely breaks forward.
Chow Ying Lee had one sandwiched in between, off a simple but productive run up the middle.
lu Zunwen then had reason to be thankful that he was not playing in a competitive game, after he felled Iranian midfielder Houshyar Homayouni from the back, which had his teammates hounding referee Cincinat Coporan for a red card. Bonner had a mind of his own, thankfully for Lu, and settled for a yellow coupled with a final warning.
The second half began as did the first, with a couple of near misses from Tian and Chow, with Mohd Safri strangely subdued. Both were met by fingertip saves from Kivelä, but he got third time unlucky with a tame-looking grounder from Chow in the 69th minute that took a heavy bounce right in front of him.
Chupacabras' best hope of a consolation came in the 76th minute, when French showman Ezzedine Dhiab's trick pass came off perfectly for youth promotee Richard Zámocký - however, the 17 year-old winger, playing only his fourth senior game, was unsure as to how to react, and the opportunity was lost.
If the opponents were done, Tian and Chow were certainly not, and Tian scuffed a fourth in from an uncleared corner before Chow completed his hat-trick with aplomb.
Zhu Changchun then found a reason, like Lu, to take a warning from the match, after getting booked for impeding Nicolae Carp's dribbled illegally.
Lu then cleaned up after another corner, with Kivelä unable to get his hands firmly around the ball, before
Paolo Iten placed a completely extraneous penalty kick to round it up, as
Dexter Stacey at the other hand marked consecutive clean sheets with slightly overblown enthusiasm.